


The Long Suffering of a Curious Cat

by Ecaliber



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alexi Mayhew/Emily Kaldwin (ish), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emily has had enough of everyone okay, F/M, Freeform, Garbish reasoning, Medium Chaos (Dishonored), Mental Health Issues, Other, Out of Character, Pre-Canon, Self-Indulgent, Serious Empress Emily, Slice of Life, Slow Build emsider, Some Plot, Sorry Not Sorry, Unbeta'd, Wyman is the Outsider, You don't need to say 'I love you', didn't want to mislead anyone, not really maybe yes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:06:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 64,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24895879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ecaliber/pseuds/Ecaliber
Summary: "You knew The Outsider?" Her father spins, a hand on her arm, outrage striking his face so fervently. "Why didn’t you tell me? When did he appear to you?”“The day after Delilah froze you into stone. He came to me on the Dreadful Wale." She admits, confessing without shame because it is the truth. Technically. "I didn’t think it was important.”Her eyes slide to The Outsider. A languid cat tilting his head and raising a mischievous eyebrow.Oh.So this is how it's going to be.“I believe you were five, Empress," The Outsider comments, a devilish glint in his ochre eyes matching the devious hook on his lips, "when we first met.”Emily Kaldwin. The Outsider. Through the years.Major character death. It's not who you think it is.
Relationships: Emily Kaldwin/The Outsider
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	1. He knows her name

**Author's Note:**

> This is a self indulgent fic. It's a mess in all honesty. But I love it. I'm a sad person and it translates in my writing. My friends think this is an obsession. It's a good obsession, in my opinion lol.
> 
> Unbeta'ed. So sorry about this. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored. This is purely a fan-fictitious work. Any real name or event mentioned is merely coincidental.

* * *

**_"_ **

_She hears a bullet fire behind her._

_A flex in her hand halts time and sepia tints her vision. The air is still as she turns to possess the Duke's soldier. She walks the stocky body to where she once stood, leaving him before she even gets used to the chunky limbs of the soldier._

_Emily ducks under the bullet in the air, heading towards the end of the hallway and away from where she was caught._

_She fires an arrow at the other soldier just peeking from the corner and moves from the room._

_Time resumes._

_Her projectiles whistle through the air and she hears the collapse of the bodies as she reaches for the chandelier overhead in the main hall.  
  
_

_**"** _

_**Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be.** _

* * *

She was ten when she first met him. That is what she thought. 

Her eyes open to the ceiling of the room she has slept in since the day Corvo had rescued her from the weird-smelling house full of underdressed ladies. They were so nice to the men that visit them, but so poisonous when it comes to her and her trying to leave her room. If she thinks about it hard enough, she can still taste the half-rotten fruit and the dryness in the stale bread they gave her as food. 

Even more so the sour and dusty water they gave her to drink. Water shouldn't have a describable taste but the one they gave did. Desperate times had called for desperate measures. She needed to eat a little to prevent hunger from settling in her bones, or them stopping their so-called generosity. 

Something rings in her ears and Emily knows that the weightlessness and restlessness that she feels means she is not actually in the same room. She doesn't know why. It is like the unexplainable feeling of home she feels with her Father when he comes back from his daily trips. 

She turns and pulls herself up from the bed. 

Another world has opened in her room, splintering the wall where the windows should be and extending the floor where it shouldn't. She sees the hole in the world sprawled before her. 

The air is colder there than the warmth she feels atop her mattress. She can feel the weight of the cool. 

There is a song playing like a whisper in her ears, now that she discerns. But the language is foreign to her. Ancient. Far older than the ones Callista tries to teach her. 

Emily stands. A force on two legs. She remains unperturbed even as a colossal creature with a round head and a tail seem to glide by in the air beyond the carpet. Like swimming through the wind like water. 

She knows what that is. 

It is a _Leviathan_ , massive mammals that roam the seas and end their lives by being caught in hooks and nets. It cuts through the air here, swimming so freely. 

She steps forward.

Rocks pull from below. A space beyond the bottom of her floors in the world before her. They form islands, shards of land that stretch further than her comprehensible sight. Her nerves tingle at the prospect of exploration. Her steps hurry. Woodwork disappears into concrete. She knows that her room has become an island, like the ones that she sees closer now. 

She stands on the edge, where her room-island does not connect to the stone and concrete-looking islands that float in the space far beyond her own. 

Cold wind whips around her hair and whistles in her ears. She eyes the large swimming whales that travel across her entire vision. Whales with their protrusions on their underbelly and their tails that swing up and down on air as if in water. She knows how many barrels of oil can be refined from a single whale, she knows the price of each barrel, each cut of meat and blubber that can be carved from the carapace of each mammal. 

She knows the slaughter and the blood that runs from houses. She knows how they bleed. And she wonders, if the Leviathans that are swimming so freely around the air in this world, are the souls of the ones that have died, so free without pain. 

Emily looks out to them over the edge and notices that there is an island just beneath her, a small leap down. 

It is the first step of exploration that she has a choice to take. To walk into the unknown, or to go back and sleep and pass it all as a mystifying dream when she wakes. 

Emily leaps. 

She knows where this is leading to. Of whales swimming in an otherworldly realm, singing and humming throughout a space so full of islands and still so barren like a void, oh she knows who presides over this ethereal world and she will be damned if she doesn't make use of this chance. 

Questions that have run so loudly in her ears since watching her mother's blood splatter across the white marble under the gazebo. Questions that have burned and crackled in her mind ever since watching six men flicker across rooftops, and still do. Questions that have spilled out of her lips, instead of tears out of her eyes, because she rather now how than why. 

She lands on her feet without a wobble on the grey stone. 

A black shadow swirls in a whirlpool of ash before her, announced by a burning cold chill. A man is formed in its stead, frigid ice radiating off him in rolling waves. He comes to shape. A pale face stark against a grey coat. He is familiar. When she looks up at him, she stares. 

He has no eyes. 

Or rather, his eyes are opal gems, darker than the black of night with no whites and deeper than the depths of the ocean, threatening to pull her into a yearning abyss in her mesmerisation. She looks down, averting her gaze to look at the alabaster skin of his cheeks and jaw, pale in the absence of what sun this place doesn't have, and oh, he is quite tall, towering over her just under the way Corvo does, needing her to tilt her chin to look at him. 

"Outsider." She whispers. More of an acknowledgement, than a statement of assurance to herself. 

She hears him hum. As if intrigued by her being in front of him. 

"Emily Kaldwin, daughter of the late Empress of the Isles and no other to her name. How did you recognise mine?" 

She eyes the dark-haired man before her, his arms clasped behind his back, looking at her and regarding her like a speck of dust that glinted gold for a moment. He looks down at her with a gaze that crawls under her skin. 

He feels familiar. An entity that she has known before, an itch she cannot fathom the location of. But of course, she knows. This being before her is the bane of all of man's existence. She knows this inside out. 

She lets the gaze crawl. But she does not let her chin fall. Defiant against his lowly regard, she eyes him with the same disdain he gives. 

"The Abbey has strictures against you, Outsider. I would be a fool to think that there are any other that can grant otherworldly powers other than you."

"I see. Peculiar, aren't you?" There is an exquisite tone in his voice. The change from annoyance to interest. He knows how to strike her. Exquisite, but starting to be unscrupulously annoying with his effortless ability to dig. "You hide your intellect from the people around you. A petulant child you act but far from it, you are."

Emily straightens. The Abbey did say that this entity is always watching the world spin. She has already expected her cover to blow. No one will care for the words of the Outsider if he chooses to speak, for he is an enigmatic individual and his words freeze people in place with fear and surprise much more than arresting them in his truth. 

But he will not appear to uninteresting people as well, for that is what The Abbey had always decreed with their scriptures, and Corvo knows how deviously smart she can be anyways. She learnt the masquerade from him. 

She decides to pay his words no heed. 

"What kind of powers do you give people? Do you choose what you give so they can only do certain actions?" She asks. She needs to know his mechanics. She needs to know his thoughts. They are important keys to know how a person works, how they think. And how they will act in the future. 

"Have you not known that curiosity can kill a cat, young Emily?" The Outsider titters. An eyebrow raised before he suddenly disappears in a whirlwind of black smoke and white ash. 

"Hey!" She exclaims. Preposterous! Eluding her like this. And here she thought she had become interesting enough for his requirements. Wandering minds, roving hands, and all. 

She is unable to make another peep before stone suddenly rises before her. Shards rising and jutting out of corners, wood splintering from the ground and an archway grows from the foothold. As it rises, she recognises it easily as an arch from the gazebo in the garden, marble cracking and folding open like wood. 

The gazebo her mother was murdered under. There is nothing but a hollowness that comes with the realisation. 

The wood forms a platform before her eyes. A platform with a sharp curling tree that roots into the stone and a trunk that strikes through the archway in broken halves. 

She does not look back. She wants to know. 

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is a need to know how this being works, how he gives, and how he takes. She needs to know what kind of price those roof-walkers were willing to pay in exchange for the satisfaction of killing her mother. She will only be satisfied once she has the answers. 

She moves forward and with every step, islands rise around her and further away. They jut out with sharp edges and splinter into stone shards that hang in the air without assistance. They crack and rise in height, some holding up pillars of wood and stone, some raising unidentifiable structures. 

She stands under the archway and watches as The Outsider appears in a puff of smoke again. A flair of the dramatic, or an otherworldly side effect? 

Especially the lingering cold tendrils of dark smoke. Witheringly frigid. 

"Curiosity may have killed the cat, Outsider, but satisfaction had brought it back." She greets him with the words, and then demands. "Tell me why you assign powers the way you do." 

His arms straighten behind his back. He hums, intrigued, no doubt. She thinks that he will humor her, that he will give answers with a price like he does when he gives power. 

But no. 

He speaks. And he speaks with the truth she asks for. She does not know why she knows this. Why she doesn't doubt, especially since The Abbey was always lamenting the serpentine lies of The Outsider. 

"I do not assign powers, young Emily. I merely grant." He says. He disappears in a puff of smoke again, and Emily is prepared to run for him before his voice comes from behind. She whirls around, meeting him on her left as he lounges on a jutted shard of the tree. "The powers are molded by the person. The kind of characteristic, values, and traits that a person has, the kind of ability that they will take shape."

The kind of person, the form of power?

Those people that seemed to appear and disappear as they run atop the roof, those people that disappear from a sword slash, the ones who appear to stab a sword into a woman, an empress, and those people that vanish without a trace. 

What kind of people are they, what characteristics do they hold in common, to share this sort of power?

Her head rises to speak, having fallen into the contemplative habit of a finger on her chin whenever she thinks deeply. She finds The Outsider gone from his perch. 

She spins around again.

He is not within sight. Another goose chase. Another run.

This time, there are no connective stones rising from the never-ending below. The steel blue remains still around her, whilst the wind continues to blow ghasts in her face. 

The nearest island of stone is a jump away below. A leap of faith she knows she can reach, but may still fail if a foot is misplaced. 

She peers the edge. If her foot wobbles if she lands, the edge of the stone may give way and crumble. 

Does The Outsider want to see how far she will go for her answers? 

She shall get down to her hands then. 

Emily takes a few steps backwards to give herself a running start. She launches after a sprint that makes wind cut her face. Air holds her for a still moment before she descends. Dropping without the assistance that broken stone shards has in this world to stay afloat. 

Her hands find stone. Her knees crush against the jagged edge of the island. She lands steadily despite her feet hanging in the air. 

She pulls herself to her feet, making sure to be balanced as she stands. 

The island rolls out before her. Rough grey stone and desolate wind. The stone ahead splits and the right half curls in fragments, boards of stone swirling and extending into an invisible vortex. The left half of what remains of her path leads beyond the vortex, up a distant flight of marble looking stone stairs that seem too familiar, leading through another marble archway. 

She played hide and seek with Corvo on them once, those white marble steps. Like a foggy memory she cannot reach, much less grasp. 

The Outsider announces himself again in his dramatic side effect puff of black smoke, white ash, and shards. He stands just by the base of the spiraling stone, eyeing her as she pats the scruff on the white fabric of her pants futilely. 

She demands another answer as she walks towards him. "What do people pay to get those powers that you grant?" 

The Outsider eyes her. There is a thinly veiled sliver of curiosity laying hidden behind a wall of annoyance. 

"Do you want power, young Emily? To avenge your mother and to find out where your loyal, doting royal protector goes during the day?" He asks in return. An eyebrow raised. 

She doesn't. She doesn't need this power. She knows where Corvo goes when he leaves the Hounds Pit Pub. She knows what Corvo does when he leaves. Sometimes, she doesn't go too close to him when he sleeps because she knows how dangerous he can be if he is startled. 

And she doesn't need to avenge her mother. Corvo is doing that. She just needs to be an Empress the world has never seen, an Empress the world will not take lightly. Her words will be law, her constitution will support her, her parliament will be straightened under her gaze. 

Emily frowns, looking up at the chthonic deity. This man grants powers but has no control over how they are used. He imbues supernatural abilities to men he finds interesting. 

The girl knows, _Emily_ knows that she is not as interesting as she wants to be. 

"I don't want the power. I want to know what it took for people to kill my mother." She states. Her eyes shift to the ground. "I need to know." She says softer, "when the time comes for me, I need to know how to act so that I can become better than my mother was."

The art of negotiation. The act of parley. A clash of swords is a deliberation. A clash of swords and a push of words is an adjudication in plain sight. An Empress able to defend herself and fight with words and swords will be legendary. She will stop swords with words, and she will cull words with action. 

Her mother only had words. In her last moments, she was too frozen to speak. Too surprised for rebuttal. Emily as well. She only yelled for her mother upon her death, with no action to spend. 

The Outsider hums. He sounds accepting of her answer. She wonders why he has humuored her with his presence for so long. 

He disappears. 

He wants her to earn her answers. She sees it. She has his attention. He wants to know how far she will go. Does he think that she is merely a little girl, able to be chased away with the slightest dismissal? 

Emily raises her chin. 

She won't come to him. She'll make him come to her. 

She wants her answers. She needs her answers. 

She needs to know what it took to become so resolved against an enemy that people are prepared to pay their prices. So resolved that their blades do not waver when they run through an Empress, no remorse for the utter chaos they throw the Empire into. 

She will let him see just what she is willing to do to get the answers. Control is her strongest desire. She knows how to make people see only what she sees. To make people understand, that the only path that they can take, is her path. 

She will show her hand. 

Emily bursts into a run, but she does not go forward to where the islands line up against another platform. 

No. Instead, she turns to her left, and she runs towards the side edge of this island where the archway sitting atop marble steps reminds her of the blood that spilled from her mother's body. 

She sees the bottomless void beneath this island, with no other stone platforms underneath her and only the ones beyond her reach, and she does not stop. 

She kicks off the edge. She eyes that gargantuan whale swimming in the distance, and she turns her body around as she falls like time has slowed for her mind to comprehend. 

She sees The Outsider standing on the edge where she jumped off. 

She closes her eyes. There is a fraction of a second that she takes to deliberate her risky actions. Perhaps she has overestimated her level of fascination. Perhaps he does not see her as interesting as she thinks she is. 

Perhaps, if she falls like this, she will fall forever and she will never wake up from this void. This desolate world of grey and constant songs, this situation feels far more pertinent to her than the materialistic cutthroat world of royals and adversaries that she was born into. 

She had caught the exasperation on The Outsider's face, and she wonders if he will actually let her fall endlessly. Or would she splatter onto the stone of an island far beneath? 

Cold hands grab her wrist and her legs swing in the air. Her eyes open to wind smacking her face as she dangles upright from where The Outsider holds her. 

" _Mortals_." He grouses. "Desperate, aren't you?" 

He pulls her up and dumps her on the stone with her mind still whirring about how she was about to fall into a bottomless pit with perhaps no escape for all eternity. 

She watches him swimmingly, as he crosses his arms to wait for her to get a grip. 

"What do you want, child? Have you no knowledge of death? Do you wish to join your mother so desperately?" 

She stands. Frown on her face a contrast to The Outsider's arched eyebrow. 

"Don't run away from me again, Outsider. Your consistent elusion is an annoyance that makes up for the thankful lack of cryptic words you have for me. Why not answer all of my questions in one sitting and you can be rid of me?" 

" _Questions_. Are you worthy of the burdensome answers that you seek?" He leans forward, regarding her with sharp scrutinising eyes. "You are but a sheltered princess without a throne, demanding answers from a god. What future do you worry for, what adversaries are you afraid of, when you are and will be shielded for your entire life?"

She remains rooted. She does not reel back even as his face is blasphemously close to hers. Emily maintains her strict composure and she does not falter.

She will not. She cannot. The prize for her mother's death and her own future, they lie on the words that this entity will give her. She seeks answers. She will not break until she has them. 

"How useful is an Empress who does not worry for the future? Where can you find a throne without threat? What good are shields if people with powers can get through them? If I cannot fight these problems with my hands, Outsider, I will fight them with words that I have been privileged to learn since birth." She shoots back, unrelenting. 

This makes him straighten. He looks down at her stiffly with the probing gaze that she is getting slowly used to now. 

She dares him, silently, to go against her words. 

Her mother had thought her to be a flower child, wild and happy and adventurous even in the rain. To see her daughter running so free, whereas she grew up shackled under rules, her mother never enforced any. 

Though Emily does not lament that that is the fact everyone sees, she knows that she is not a flower child. 

She is an iron force of will clad over-determined curiosity and lethal logic, hidden underneath a padded layer of sheep's wool. She has her mother's name, her mother's eyes, and mouth and face, but she will always be her father's daughter. 

The deity before her hums, contemplatively, deflating the tense air that perhaps she is the only one to feel. 

"And what words have you learnt, young Emily?" He asks, turning away from her. There is a niggling feeling in her back that causes her to walk after him. She fears he will disappear again on her. 

"Treachery. Outsider." She says vaguely. "Will you answer my questions now?" 

He spins back around. She nearly stumbles into him. 

"And what will you be willing to do for them?" He asks, questioningly, expectantly. Righteously. 

The price that she is willing to give in return for a favor of The Outsider. The Abbey of Everyman thinks that this man will just take and take and take and never give like the totalitarian omnipotent being he seems to be. What they don't know is that this man will give what is due and take what is owed instead, all for the sake of stroking his interest. This is evident from the roof-walkers, oh how they have to stop when they appear and disappear multiple times at once. 

And when it comes to her price, the sacrifice she will give in return, it is natural that she doesn't think before she speaks. 

"Friendship." 

And she knows she didn't think before she spoke. By the _Abbey_ , where did _that_ come from? That doesn't make any _sense_ . But she _doesn't_ retract her answer. She remains firm as if she had meant to say that all along. Spontaneity, her greatest friend but also her worst enemy.

"Being alone here bores you, I'm pretty sure. You've been alone and spending time on nothing for the most of it haven't you?"

A raised eyebrow. Again. "Oh? And what makes you so sure that friendship will be worth what useless time I seem to have?" 

He vanishes. Black smoke and white Ash in her face. 

What need of her friendship would a god require anyways? But of course, perhaps it would not be the friendship Emily had blurted out. This god in question is a dark god. The worship of him is shunned with the Abbey owing him all of the people's worst deeds and unholy desires. Wanton flesh, wandering eyes, and restless hands. He is blamed for the ruin of the world, and every black Plague of darkness fallen on every man.

The renegades who worship him are betrayers of man. They are the sinners and the unholiest of the people who they walk among. They are few and far in between, hiding in secrecy and the skittish fear of being found out, but their belief that their worship of this entity outweighs whatever risk they take to pledge their lives to this chthonic deity. It is with this, that comes with worshipping and much less knowing the existence of The Outsider. 

Now how isolated would this god be, to accept her offer? 

All that, she thinks in the seconds he is gone. Then beside her, he appears in the same burst, a beat just before she thinks he has finally gotten enough of her insolence. 

She replies as if she isn't worried about his disappearance. As if the words _"What do I need of a friendship with a little girl"_ had not sunk into her bones yet. 

"Take it as an exchange. Your answers, for my forever welcome to your presence. The world has a fair share of being unwelcoming to you and your devout worshippers, but I will be quite the opposite. As a friendship entails, you will always be welcomed beside me, before me, around me."

It is, to her, a very large and demanding offer that she is giving. She is offering her unwavering attention, and general acceptance of the presence of a god that the world thinks is the bane of humankind and every other kind of existence. The literal god of everything unholy and treacherous. He is thought to be the attribution of every evil deed man has ever done. 

As the rightful Empress of the Isles, it is a steep offer. Easily able to fall from the peak of the demand it takes. And it is simply, simply—

"Such a heresy, young princess." He comments. 

She agrees silently with him. 

"All the more worth your time then?" She tilts her head to ask. 

He hums. And vanishes. 

He pops up again further away, sitting atop the cleft on the island where the stone protrudes from the spiral, just before white stone steps, with his burst of smoke catching her attention. 

She walks over. Do gods get tired of standing? Where does he go when he disappears? 

"Are you going to answer my questions?" She asks when she is close enough to feel the chill of the smoky tendrils twisting in and out his body. It is a large radius of cold, prickling her skin even underneath her white layers across the distance. 

The Outsider hums again. She watches him tilt his head. 

He is entertaining her. She knows. He is like the adults in the parliament room, wondering if she is worth the weight of truths and the heaviness that comes with knowledge. Wondering if she would understand them, for age is just a number and intellect plays more part in the understanding than experience. Or rather, that is what she thinks. The Officiates of her Mother's office, and of course the current Horrid regent in her place, do not think the same. She sees that this entity does. 

He doesn't seem very much older than her. 

But is he frozen this way, or did he choose to appear in this way? 

"You want to know the price of my gifts, Emily Kaldwin? You would be of the few that asked." 

"Tell me." 

The Outsider bursts into a flurry of smoke and ashes again, but he appears behind her fast enough that she remains unperturbed. 

"And it seems I shall." He says, tall and imposingly above her. She only deigns his reappearance with a tilt of her chin, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of being able to make her uncomfortable. 

The steps suddenly shake in the corner of her eyes. She looks back at them just in time to see them burst into splinters, wide eyes only able to watch as the marble stone cracks into stone shards fracturing into smithereens as they explode outwards and away from her. The arch sitting atop the now splintered steps and the spiral of wood curling over their heads shreds into the air, following the fractured marble by tearing back into the wind of The Void, leaving the island around them barren. 

He places a hand on her shoulder, stilling her as the world starts to rumble from below. Grey splinters rise from the nothingness of below. 

The Void pulls stone and rock into a larger island around their feet, churning together in a whirlpool before forming together with masterfully, artfully placed rock slotting into rightful positions to puzzle out their platform into a circular island rimmed with jutting rocks spiraling skywards, where red-hot fire flares orange upon every touch of connective stone. 

The wind howls in ripples in her ears, not quite screaming, but heavy with the chill of power. It rests, only when the island has become fully formed around them. 

But it does not remain still and quiet for long. 

The Outsider releases her shoulder, and she does not feel his gaze any longer. 

She does not mind the absence of his attention, for glowing lights suddenly fade into existence around them, blinking alive in mid-air around the rock surface they stand on. Numerous individual red fragments, shards of light, they float around them, spiraling into visible air where there was once nothing there. 

Smoke and ashes, black wispy tendrils and fractured shards much like the cloak that swirls around The Outsider behind her, they suddenly deep from the stone below each moving, bobbing shard of light. The inky shadows pull together over each shard, and Emily watches as they form a loose shape of a human. 

Walking people. Black splinters of a silhouette, swirling around each shard. Like… 

Like they were ghosts. Spirits. 

Some of the silhouettes are still, hunched. As if they are curling into themselves. Others are roaming. Walking, crawling over the grey stone they stand on. 

"Were they people?" She asks. More to herself than The Outsider behind her. She knows the answer. She sees the still shadows, arms, and legs. Hands pooling around featureless wispy faces, as if they were covering them. 

Covering them as they weep. 

"The price of my gift, Emily Kaldwin." The Outsider states as a matter-of-factly. "You do as you please when your heart still beats, but when you die, you come to The Void. You suffer each consequence of your actions done unto others."

Her eyebrow crinkles. She feels them so. She is more confused than she thought. 

Why do they suffer, when he grants them a taste of The Void? 

The people here. The souls left here, she understands returning the piece of The Void given to them by forcing their souls to be tethered here, but why do they suffer from their consequences? Why do they need to _regret_? 

Emily spins around to look up into his eyes. She sees the arched brow of her impending questions. 

"Why do they need remorse? Why force them to suffer instead of just letting them lament the fact that they have to be here and not with the people they love? Why make them regret?" 

His gaze shifts from her. She does not see the yearning abyss of his eyes move, for they do not seem to be able to, but she feels the crawl of his scrutiny glancing elsewhere before returning onto her head. 

"They touch the world with The Void. Couriers, they had become, when I gift them. But those without, they do not come here, do they?" 

She tilts her head, turning to look around and back at the black weeping souls around them. There is not a large number of them here. She counts them easily. Are these people really all that there is? The ones that have taken his gifts over the many years this entity may have existed? 

"They suffer here because the people they touched with The Void can't be here." She reiterates in her words. "And since that part of The Void can't return, they lament that instead." 

"The Void gives, and The Void takes. The world started here, and it will end here. The Void isn't given back what was taken, the takers suffer instead." 

Ah. 

The price of his gift. His mark touching each core of a person, tainting them. When they spread it to the rest of the world, the rest turn grey. Stained. When the time comes to clear the dark ichor that runs quietly in the veins of man, there is darkness where there should not be, and the Marked are then tortured over the consequences of spreading this darkness.

"Would you be one of them, Emily Kaldwin?" He asks. There is a hint in his voice, foreboding. Testing. 

She observes the weeping souls, twisting black over burning coals of red. Some of them wail in their torment with their hands covering what features unrecognisable in their faces. 

These souls, they once walked the world as men with flesh and blood just like her. Eternal torment as they now roam the frigid emptiness of The Void, to fulfill the holes from the darkness they had spread elsewhere.

Her father will become one of them. She has seen how he covers his hands and deflects what questions she has. He knows that she does. She is smart that way, uncannily sharp and observant, seeing more than she lets on. She sees the mark on his hands, glowing sometimes when he sleeps, and possibly glowing whenever this shadow man appears in hers. 

She will never be one of them. 

She will come to spend her life with her father, enjoying his company, his protection, and most of all, his guidance. He will love her with all his heart and she will do the same as she lives. 

But in her death, she will make up for the lack of time with her mother. Taken away much too early. 

"No." Emily asserts, with a calm confidence in her tone. 

The Outsider hums again. Interested, wanting to see how her life will plan out for her to be so sure. She can hear it. 

"That is what they all say, girl."

He vanishes. Wispy smoke curling in her face. 

She hears rocks fall, nothing in front of her changes but the slow trailing weeping souls so she turns to see a part of the spiralling rock wall opening to allow a passage back out to the rest of the expanse of The Void. 

::

At the foot of the path is another stone platform.

But it is unlike any other, for there is a fissure sitting atop the grey rock, a fissure in the air and Space, like a tear in a canvas. Just that the canvas is the world itself and the tear opens up through to her own. 

She knows it is her world, where light from a fluorescent lamp is glowing bright, casting a shine out onto the grey of the rock through the fissure. She can see nothing of what is through the fissure from this above angle, but she knows. 

Emily takes the steps down. Marble under her feet. 

It is time to end this round. In return from perhaps what is a friendship to last for the rest of her life or until The Outsider gets enough of her insolence and she wears out his interest in her, she would perhaps be able to ask The Outsider questions forever when he visits in his flurry burst of smoke and ashes.

Emily touches onto grey stone. Her room above the Houndspit Pub sprawled before her. The Outsider is inside, and she sees him clearly with the cool blue of the whale oil lamp slick over the navy of his coat and the black of his hair. 

He is looking at her drawings. The ones he drew of father and Callista and Mother. 

And of him. Now that she realises. 

The black silhouette of a thin man, standing at the base of the steps. A quiet figure looking out onto a barely starting sunset that casts a yellow shine over the dull grey of Dunwall's roofs. 

She has seen him before. Somewhere. Somehow. 

Emily steps forward. Cool grey stone flaking, splinting, and spilling into warm wood planks. 

The air is different here. A familiarity. It is home, suddenly unerringly warm and hot in comparison to the gelid chill of the hollow vastness of The Void. 

The warmth crawls over her skin when she steps onto wooden planks. A tepidly snug blanket flush against her body. She wonders, if she had spent too long in a world that is not hers, a world that she does not belong in, for the temperate of her own to suddenly feel broiling and so peeling. 

She steps forward. The Outsider turns to her, away from the small bedside where he has arranged Corvo's portrait to the top of the stack instead of the landscape of Dunwall's Sunset, where he stands in the bottom quarter of. 

“I haven’t finished asking.” She points out, eyes sharp into abysmal depths of black opal. She watches the entity as he leans back, hands crossing over his chest. He hums. Looking at her with a nonplussed expression, an eyebrow raised.

“All in good time, Emily Kaldwin. There is only so much time for us to talk.” He says. Why? She is sure not much time has passed. But perhaps the concept of time is different in his world from her own. Is he going to talk to her father? Is he not able to do that at once as he is visiting her?

“You aren’t omniscient, then?” She asks, mirroring him; crossing her arms and staring right back with the same unimpressed expression. He bursts in his flurry of smoke and ashes, shadows swirling out of existence. 

The intensity of his cold fades from the heated room before her and reappears behind on cool grey stone. A chill crawling down her neck and blooming into her face. Her ears prickle. She turns around to look at him, a black-clothed man stark against the cool grey-blue pallor of The Void, an expectant expression a constant base sewed into the sinews of his face.

She watches him regard her coolly, dour eyes all-seeing. 

“Don’t we all wish to be?” 

His words echo. She does not see when the edges of his world and hers bleed into a blend, nor does she see when this encounter ends nor stops. 

There is no blackness that consumes her vision in the mockery of sleep, nor a blinding light that forces her eyes shut.

She merely looks at him and blinks in the same mocking expectant expression that he gives her, and she opens her eyes to the ceiling of her room above the Houndspitt Pub.

Warmth is like a blanket around her even in the absence of the duvet. It is an annoyance that does not make her sweat but stifles her instead.

* * *

She actually met him at five. 

She is a bumbling five year old, and oh running around her palace, she finds herself somewhere she shouldn't be with eerily candles lighting up a purple room draped in purple curtains and decorated with dried plants and wire and wood. She knows she can't be here because there is no one here and Mother always says that she can only be somewhere where there are people to oversee her. More specifically, where Lord Corvo can see. 

In her defense, the purple curtains and candles look like a nice combination. She got bored with having to learn how to write properly and she left during the chaos after she sneezed grape juice all over pretentious Madam _Quassopina_. Seriously, what kind of family name is that? She wants to see if Mother can rename her family. She'll think to ask that soon. _Olivia_ matches _Qupina_ way better than _Quassopina._ Maybe she'll be less of a sourpuss too. 

She is blowing out all the fire in rapid succession starting from the door she entered from when she got to the middle where a pretty table stood, there is a pretty rock on top of it, catching her eye with the glinting metal and white rock. 

A very _pretty_ rock with shiny metal sticking out of it. It has a very nice drawing inside it. All spirals and pointy corners. It looks like the circle thing in the corner of the map she has in her room. The one she tries to draw but she can't get close enough because it's above her bed and she can't bring her paper and her pencils on the bed lest she dirties the sheets. 

She reaches out to take it. Deciding to blow out the next half of the candles that stand on the floor on the other side of the table after. 

Nothing happens. The rock just feels cold to the touch, and the carved spirals look so much prettier up close. 

Emily runs back to her room, after blowing out the rest of the candles of course, excited to finally be able to draw the spiral pointy circle. She hopes her tutor won't find her so soon. 

::

Emily is playing hide-and-seek with Corvo. She doesn't know how she knows she is, she just does. 

She is trying to find the big man and while he isn't really good at this game for some reason even though he's really good at being invisible whenever she has to follow Mother to court parties, this place by the stone stairs is big. 

_Huff_. "Where are you?" She exclaims. He's not really this hard to find. Not usually. He always hides at places that she can find within seconds. Like behind the desk, or in the closet, or behind the heavy curtains. Well, it is outdoors. He normally hides behind a pillar and he's not there now. 

Something black darts behind her. Up the stairs, past her, as she turns. 

Does that big man think he can sneak past her like that?! 

She runs after him immediately but pauses at the base of the steps when he's not up there. He's not at the top where he should be because Corvo may be super fast but he just can't climb that fast. She only just turned around! 

"You've been holding out on me!" She yells after Corvo upon realisation, then starts to take off up the white steps. 

She is running up the stairs, and why are there just so many steps? Were there this many steps? They all look similar and she tries really hard to look and not trip on any because getting herself injured is a really big deal and she doesn't want to disturb Mother from her writing. Mother always look so worried whenever Emily gets injured and she doesn't know if it's because she'll have more work to do or because Emily is—

—Oomph!" She slams into someone and oh she's falling-back-she-doesn't-want-to-look—

"You should be careful with where you're going, girl." 

Someone is holding her arm and she doesn't feel like all her bones are broken and she doesn't hear her mother crying oh, that's good. 

Emily peeks open an eye upwards to see a very pretty man with really, really pretty eyes. She's never seen his eyes before. They look like black gems and they look so, so deep. 

"Who're you?" She asks. She really wants to know his name because she wants to see if Mother can get him to come to the Tower more often because he looks so pretty. She doesn't care that she was about to fall to her maybe painful death or that he's holding her hand or that he called her girl, she just wants to know his name. 

He doesn't reply to her. Which is a sad thing. He just pulls her back straight to her feet and walks by her, brushing past and down the steps. 

Once she regains her footing, she pulls after him. She has to get his name. Just his name. Maybe he can teach her handwriting instead of Madam Olivia whatever. He most probably won't cause a ruckus like she did if she sneezed grape juice on him. He doesn't look like someone who would. 

When she turns around, however, she finds that he is at the bottom of the steps already, looking out over the white wall that she can't really see over herself. Is he as tall as Corvo? How does he walk so fast? It was probably why she didn't see him on the stairs when she was running upwards anyways. 

She runs down, making sure she looks at the steps she takes, then heads towards the man's side. He looks so skinny from the back. 

"What are you looking at?" 

She is not tall enough to peer over the stone rails. She stands on her tippy toes, hands on the white stone, trying to pull herself up so she can see over. 

She can't. She looks up at the man instead, peering up at a pale face and high cheekbones. Surely he can carry her. She wants to know what he is looking at so interestingly. Surely the grey city of Dunwall isn’t that appealing to him. 

A hand reaches out to tug on the hem of his jacket. 

Dark eyes glance down. Pretty black onyx studying her face with some kind of a mix between a discountenance and nonplussed expression. She doesn't care how his stare crawls on her skin. 

"What are you looking at?" She repeats. 

"Looking over Dunwall." He says dryly, looking back up and over. "Dunwall in your astounding memory."

Right. This place is actually a good place to look out over the city. Corvo carries her to look over the buildings sometimes if he was hiding around here and not up in the gardens. She remembers how the city looks over an orange skyline, with the sun lying low on the horizon and it being about to be dinner time. 

She wonders how the colourful houses have changed so far along the Park District since the last time she has seen them. Have the people planted flowers atop their roofs? Having a field of multi-coloured flowers would really brighten up the city.

She can't see over it still. Corvo says she will be when she gets older but for now, she peers up at the tall dark man and crinkles an eyebrow at him as she does with Corvo when he's asking her to do something she obviously needs his help with. 

Dark eyes move to pin on her again. They don't seem to be moving actually, but she feels when he looks at her rather than see him look at her. His eyes don't move like Corvo's, but they feel the same. Like a slow sliver of calm indifference. 

It's funny. Mother always turns her head when her eyes move. Corvo's eyes move like they're detached from his head, just like every other Royal guard, now that she realises. And apparently, this man too. 

Is he a guard too? She's never seen any of them as skinny as he is though. She never sees them wearing anything other than the red uniforms and black lapels either. Is he a spy? If he is, then it would make sense that she has never seen him before because he would be able to blend into everywhere right? But his eyes are so pretty, easily remembered, easily identified.

"Where're you from?" 

She kind of feels her eyes clench when she looks high up at him. And her neck hurts from looking at him too. But eye contact is respect. So she really just looks at him with a twitch, waiting for his reply. 

"A place, long ago."

That doesn't even make sense. 

"How can a place be long ago?" She reels back, whispering more to herself, highly confused, looking down into the white of the banister instead of at him because that answer was so… Weird.

She looks back up to the man raising a sharp eyebrow. 

He turns back to the outside beyond the banisters that she can't see. He's not going to talk about how a place can be long ago. He's just going to look at the pretty early sunset, orange barely dusting the pinky sky with the rest of the clouds still fluffy white against bright blue on the other end of the canvas. Or from whatever she can actually see with the white wall towering over her. 

She doesn't ask him more of that then. 

Emily just turns to the blank marble white of the banister, a blank white that's nothing like the bursting colors of the sunset beyond this annoying colourless canvas. 

And then she turns back to the man again to reiterate the point she was trying to make before she wondered where he was from. 

He’s not there anymore. All she really sees is a wispy tendril of smoke twisting in the air.

And she closes her eyes to nothing.

* * *

**"**

_She is young when he meets her. A little thing with bright eyes and a smarter mind sitting behind them._

_She is not scared of the shadows that twist around him. In fact, she reaches out, enthralled._

_Brown eyes dour and wide. He watches his reflection in the sun in her gaze, as he leans down to prod her fragile body._

_She is silent. Quiet. Looking and absorbing everything new around her. She catches his finger, grasping it in an unrelenting grip, unwilling to let go even when he starts to pull back._

_"How quaint, Emily Kaldwin."_

_She is small. Bundled in soothing colours and swathed in comforting cotton._

_He thinks to another time. Another place. Another reality. Of a child with eyes yellow like the sun and hair darker than ink. A long time later. A long time never._

**"**

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *


	2. She falls, and he watches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emily grows older. Haphazardly. Somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably tag the unbeta'd somewhere up there.  
> *I know that Houndspit Pub is spelled as Hound Pits Pub. I'm pretty sure I tried spelling it in like two different ways. Idk what I was on.  
> *Thanks for the kudos and bookmarks and hits and comments mannnnnnnnn  
> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored. I don't want that responsibility either.

* * *

**_"_ **

_Cool wind on her face. Moonlight dusting her vision._

_Dunwall is beautifully haunting at night, a grey city illuminated by silver and yellow, swathed in black and navy._

_She sits down on the Clocktower, legs dangling off the ledge and not a single hold but her balance to keep her tethered._

_It is small freedom, to be out in the open, with her Father elsewhere in Tyvia as a dignitary to assuage allied ties in light of the chaos in Karnaca under the oppressive regime of the new Duke. Corvo is certainly a well trained Royal Protector (read: Operative), but she wasn't_ well trained by him _for nothing to be unable to detect him following her night runs._

_The Outsider announces himself with his swirling shadows. A quiet chill slowly lulling her into comfort._

_She pulls her legs to her chest._

_"Do tell what is on your mind, Empress. Dunwall's astounding skyline shouldn't be marred by your gloom." This_ jerk _._

_"Anyone told you that you're a bastard before?"_

**_"_ **

**_Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be._ **

* * *

She meets him again when she is fourteen. 

She had just responded to a letter (read: chicken-scratch note) left by Wyman in the early morning before Council. He was regaling tales of Pandyssia, what frivolous interesting event he cared enough to remember. There were a lot of temples there, mossy stones stacked in an intricate lace to give rise to illustrious structures, dead languages inscribed into walls, mostly gibberish. He had found shrines, draped in canopies of dried herbs and framed by scrap silvers, sooted grass the only evidence of a dead hearth. He said the continent was ancient and so very isolated, far older than The Isles, for the shrines were not dedicated to a black-eyed god, but an amber-eyed one. 

The Overseers would shriek if they ever knew of it. 

He left a little postscript for her to decipher as well. Something about a little band of people, stained red, spreading across The Isles in a web string. They have an intriguing cause, a selfless one that he doesn't reveal because she would find out soon in her own way, _whatever that meant_. 

In all honesty, the letter seemed truly like a piece of a discarded note she scribbled in passing until she took closer note that the ink wasn't in her writing, and certainly not in her drawing. 

Emily in turn, merely detailed another little note during the boredom she felt whenever she was parlaying with her council, finding herself often thinking enviously about his freedom to roam wherever he wanted to go. Negotiating with close-minded individuals was a bore, with the easiest solution to undermining their objective by introducing a proposal that satisfies both parties and seemingly more of theirs when it will only satisfy her own in actuality. 

Her privy council was appointed by her secretary when she was just inducted as Empress, with no say from herself due to her age. They belittle her due to her age. They talk over her as they view her authority as just Empress in the name. The Child Empress. And at times, she allows it for trivial matters. Matters like the fortification of Dunwall and the strengthening of trade treaties in the light of the ones The Rat Coup had burned during their short-lived reign of Dunwall. 

The Rat Coup. The name was given to the usurping of the throne by Hiram Burrows in confederation with Thaddeus Campbell and several other nobilities. A conspiracy in the making far before Empress Jessamine Kaldwin was murdered. 

It was Doctor Luigi Galvani who revealed that the traits of the rats that carried the Rat Plague were rats not native to Gristol. He had speculated the possibility of an intentional introduction to Dunwall since the origins of the Plague was rather isolated. The Rat Plague affected the lower and poorer districts of Dunwall due to the affordability of elixir, and without much effort, Hiram Burrows himself confessed to the horrendous deed that can only be described as a heinous act of terrorism against the subjects of Gristol. 

The Rat Coup, the conspiracy was thus named. 

Emily does not mind letting the council dictate the politics and safety of the people. She does not mind the financial plans made in her presence without needing her input to restore the trust and the security of the people of Dunwall. She does not mind her father and the Barristers helping to relieve the effects of the oppression that the city has undergone for the nine months of terror. 

The population is increasing steadily, and the economy is somewhere back to the increased stability it once was before the Rat Plague after these four years. And under her closer administration, the flooded Rudshore Financial District is being drained and rebuilt in spite of the Whalers that dominate the region. 

What she does mind in fact, is merely how the council still thinks that nobility should be prized far above the rest of the people of Dunwall. 

She had to stare at the Lord Montgomery Shaw of whatever important noble family as he goes on about how the improvements made to the lower class district which really, makes up for eighty percent of Dunwall, are receiving so much health aid and recuperation efforts that they are attempting to find better wages and becoming more insolent and demanding of better lifestyles that they deserve after going through the trauma of the Rat Plague. 

When in fact, he is twisting the truth. Emily has seen that herself. When he says "attempting to find better wages", her people mean that people of lower financial standings are trying to find more work to afford the already quite affordable Plague cure since jobs are needed to be filled still nowadays. When he says "demanding of better lifestyles", her people mean asking for a higher cut in working hours to allow more personal freedom in light of the low employment her country is trying to curb because of the Rat Plague. And so many just preferred to be part of gangs rather than serve. Only loyalty, easily placed, tethers the servants. 

The Plague infected seventy percent of Dunwall. It killed perhaps fifty. 

Forty and perhaps even fifty percent of her people accounted as dead, with no real number due to the past bribery and inaccurate counting of the now straightened Dead Counters. It was a miracle to increase employment and population level as much as it did by the third year of her reign. The arduous toil the government did to regain the trust of Gristol. To increase trade. To increase productivity. They were nowhere near the levels of before the Plague, but they are infinitely better now from the near decimation of the city. 

And thus, the twist in the blight of her people that this Montgomery Shaw had given, it infuriated Emily. Always occurring to herself that she needs to remind these cosseted aristocrats that makeup half her privy council about the direction that they should be steering the Empire towards. 

She stared at him until he stopped speaking. The child Empress eyeing him with such potency at every word he spoke caused him to stutter increasingly. Emily knows that her childish action is only ever going to be tolerated for so long. She intends to make use of the time that they are still relevant. 

_Tell me, Lord Shaw, what is the number of people, including the people in this district, in Dunwall?_ She had asked. _And also, tell me the number of servants you have tending to your estates, while you are at it still._

He couldn't for either question. She expected that. What kind of noble, other than her Minister of Manpower and that other Minister of Internal Affairs, would know? Although she doubts either of them knew how many people were caring for their estates either. She knows hers. She knows her servers by name. Unerringly of course, because she has heard so many tales about each and every one of them.

 _It is within the constitution of human rights that we had established so long ago, when people of Dunwall requests to have adequate wages and healthcare, Lord Shaw. We simply do not allow for slavery. As of this year, our population is still nowhere close to that of 1834, before the Rat Plague. That is not a reason to overwork the people in your employment, and every reason that we must still uphold the needs of our people._ She had said somewhere along the lines of the paragraphs that made his face turn redder than roses during the Months of Harvest and Seed. 

Emily rubs her temples. Ignorant aristocrats. Though perhaps she is one as well. 

A knock at the study door pulls her out of her head, and announces a smiling Alexi Mayhew with a tray of tea in her hands, turning with the door. 

Emily instantly raises her eyebrow at her actions. Which server could have allowed _that_? Every single one of her servants would never have allowed a visitor the entry to her food. The child Empress eyes the shadow of Genevieve, a server lady she had known since her ascension, beyond her friend's shoulder as she peers from the corner of the far wall, staring at Alexi and her every movement.

"Genevieve walked by with this tray when I was being escorted over. Hope you don't mind me delivering in her stead, Lady Emily." Alexi says as she kicks the door close. "I figured you're in for a break anyway. Your proclivity for hard work leaves you infamous for running the parliament ragged."

Emily gives her trusted friend a wry smile, placing down the pen and rising from her seat. She eyes the singular cup sitting on the tray and plucks the day-old cup that had sat on the cart by her table since this morning's breakfast as she moves over to the lounge at the center of the room. 

"And who told you that?" Emily asks. "You wouldn't know how I treat the council unless somebody told you."

She reaches Alexi's side just as the other sets the tray down to pour the chamomile tea and settles snugly against the tan chaise. 

"One of your advisors, Lord Jameson Curnow himself! He escorted me here. He bid goodbye when—Lady Emily, my word! That is gross!" Alexi exclaims as the child Empress places the morning cup that has a rim of dried tea circled within down on the tray for it to be refilled. 

Emily merely raises an eyebrow. "It's no harm, Alexi. It's just a cup from this morning." 

Now Alexi is looking at her like she had committed a crime in broad daylight right in front of her people. The ginger hitches her free hand on her hip. 

"This is blasphemy! Such an audacious act by an Empress." She chides, but she moves to pour hot tea into the painted cap anyways when Emily's eyebrow does not slack. "Why was it not cleaned away, My Lady?" 

The ebony-haired pulls the corner of her lip for a slight moment in sheepishness. She moves to take the teacup. 

"Perhaps I was too busy to finish the tea." And unreluctant to waste good breakfast tea even when it went cold. It's still better-tasting water. Flavoured water. Ha. What a simple way to describe everything. 

Alexi groans at the excuse. Emily has known the girl for three years now, since her parents visited Dunwall during her inauguration. They are visiting more often these past few months due to scouting budding possibilities for investments and Alexi always follows. This week is such a week. Alexi always makes use of this time to pull her out of Dunwall Tower. "To make sure she gets enough sunlight in your skin" she always says. 

Corvo encourages her despite the security issues that arise from spontaneous excursions. He seems to like Alexi even more after she expressed concern in Emily's wellbeing, much to Emily's disdain. While she loves adventure, the young Empress hates coming back to an increased pile of work made by decisions without her acknowledgement. She works hard to cull the growing piles, but of course, to no avail. Therefore no playtime. Nor training time. 

Speaking of which… 

"What is the plan for tomorrow?" Emily asks as she takes a sip. She watches Alexi pour herself a cup and plop down onto the chaise beside her. 

They are going for a carriage ride around Dunwall to see the changes Emily has made to the city. This will be her second ride, the first that she would have a company with. There had been many changes since her first ride two years ago without Alexi. The child Empress knows the plan for tomorrow, but she'd rather refresh herself with Alexi's point of view of the procession since it will be her first time. The skeletal itinerary is, of course, run down during the planning and the briefs that her companions are to attend, but it is little wonder if they bother to even listen. 

Though Alexi would. For some off-handed reason, truly. 

Every single spontaneous outing that they have, pulling along what disgruntled guard she had been able to rope under Corvo's eyes as they run, be it to go down to the Boulevard or further to The Clocktower, or somewhere along the River shore which would make any and every guard that they accompanied them grumble verbally in complaints of the sand that would get into their boots, was a planned extravaganza the ginger detailed strictly in her mind according to some fun schedule. 

Emily knows it. She quizzed every aspect of their adventures, and her friend never failed to give an affirmative answer. It's hilarious, it's scary. Even fun is deliberately designed according to a strategic plan. The _people_ in her life.

Alexi takes a moment to think. 

"We will set off from the tower at about nine in the morning? Well, Lord Corvo is never on time with the plans he gives people." That is true. It is a security measure to deter possible ambush. Corvo can be half an hour early, or half an hour late if she has better things to do. Or on time. He can be strange like that too. 

"We will head to the Kaldwin's Bridge to overlook the now glorious Wrenhaven River, then cross the bridge towards the Rudshore District through the new and lively Old Port District. We'll go downwards from the Boulevard Street, through the Tailor's District, then back through the Kaldwin Bridge." Alexi takes a moment to think further. Not that she isn't impressed by how the ginger is practically reciting the detailed summary of the timeline Emily has on her table, the one written by Advisor Helmswater, but she wonders why there is the need. 

"Oh wait! You will look at how the districts are improving, so we'll be following through Patterson Street and _then_ we will embark towards the Civil Services District to see how they're doing and what else needs to be done and maybe interact with the people to find out how they're doing, and then we'll head to the Old Waterfront and maybe stop to eat some of the new restaurants that have been established there depending on Lord Corvo's decision, after touring through the old whaling House that is, and then we'll head back to the tower just shy of your late afternoon council session." _Just shy_ , because Corvo won't ever be on time and everyone has already resorted to anticipating the worst-case scenario.

There is an unspoken _The End_ at the end of her refreshment of the plans. Emily could not have been any more proud of her friend. 

"Such a memory. Why the effort?" Emily wonders, because true, Alexi should know some details, but to remember the whole procession? Not even her Crown Officers will want to remember that. They just rather stand there and look pretty and wait for orders to rattle off to the City Watch. 

Alexi beams. She holds her teacup tighter in a sudden burst of rattling excitement. 

"I'm going to be part of the City Watch!" She exclaims. _What_. "I'm going to train and work hard to become a captain and serve under and close to you, Lady Emily. And then I'll be able to spend time with you every day for 'security purposes' and _no one_ will stop me."

Emily stares at the lady in surprise. Her genuine excitement and overall optimism over her plans proclaiming to serve the Empress causing Emily's brain to sputter and stall. 

Her friend wants to work for her. To dedicate her entire life to the safety of another rather than her own. 

It's not a common job. The training is grueling since they are a little spread thin and even more so running under her father's eagle eyes in his new (self) appointed role as Spymaster. Not only that, but the danger itself poses what should be a little deterrent for most people. The City Watch deals with gang-related crimes, a little more of curbing them rather than using them for the underground work that her father thinks she doesn't know him using them for. 

There have been no significant deaths in the City Watch since the corrupted ones that aided Hiram Burrows, and even they were mostly jailed if captured and not accidentally killed by her Father during The Rat Coup. 

Alexi would have no say in her life for the better part of four years in training when she becomes of age. Two would consist of basic training and protocol detail for her to be able to be sorted into the City Watch, the next two would be being inducted into specialised divisions according to her performance during the basic training years, to be trained specifically for the Royal guard detail. She would have to excel through her training with no demerits to have a chance at exclusive training, if not she would have to retake her years. It will then come for a time for her to be regarded as a detrimental officer for her to even be remotely considered for Captain of the Royal Guards, given that she does not have the Aristocratic background that most other legible captains would have.

It is a heavy dedication for someone who actually has a proper socialite life planned for her future by her parents. 

"You want to protect me?" She asks tentatively. 

"Of course! Pardon my forwardness but you're the highlight of my life, Lady Emily! Without you, I wouldn't have become the person I am today. The adventures we have, the pranks we play, you bring such joy to me." Alexi places her cup down to clasp's Emily's, jostling her teacup and her in surprise. "I want to protect you, so we can spend more time and have more fun together!"

Emily stares at her bewilderedly, looking from the hands that cup her own, to the face that just bleeds authentic eagerness and such an intensity of utter joy. 

It brings a smile to her face. 

"I'm glad to hear that, Alexi. You're my closest friend, and I will be honored to have you in my service. I look forward to many more adventures and pranks that we will play in the foreseeable future."

Today is turning out greater than she thought this afternoon, Emily thinks.

::

"Granting Daud power that he didn't need was a highlight. I admit, I was eager to see what he would do with them when he didn't require them." 

Emily admits to herself that when smoke and shadows burst at the chaise where Alexi sat just minutes before, she had thought it was her Father, merely inviting himself in at the spur of the moment to check on her upon seeing no one in detection. She had paid it no heed and decided not to look up from the report of the progress on the draining and the restoring of the Rudshore District for the carriage visit the following day. 

In a sense, The Outsider is doing the same. Just without the concern of parenthood. 

"You wondered if you would play a part in him achieving the apotheosis of his life?" She does not look at him still, merely starting to write a response to the report and detailing the reminders of what else should be done by the expected deadline, and what she would like to see during her bi-monthly visit around the district even after the tour. 

"The future changes upon decisions, but fate remains the same." The Outsider says as she looks up. She watches him pick up her cup of unfinished tea with some sort of fascination. "With or without my interference, it seems he would always be a person of _importance_ to all of your lives." 

Emily's mind censors the prod, choosing to focus on her work, on her surroundings, on everything but the catastrophic descend into emotional compromise because even if _they_ were assassins and trained mercenaries who kill for gold, they were still her people.

The Outsider moves, bringing the cup close to his lips, and for a moment Emily thinks he is going to take a sip of it. 

He doesn't. 

She watches in exasperation as he pours the cool leftover tea out onto the saucer and decides to inspect the gold that lines the cup instead as brown water overflows the tiny white saucer. 

The child Empress brings a hand to her face. Wondering what Genevieve will think when she sees the mess. She continues to write as she presses the hand to her temple. 

A moment of silence as he speculates the teacup. _As_ she tries to write her letter and not think about what the teacup may entail for him. 

"You are aware that one of your servants is a witch." 

A beat. She is. Whenever she comes close to the maid as she cleans, Emily can taste the void that bleeds from her skin, sensitive after constant exposure to the beholder himself.

She plans to have her overseers come around someday as part of a celebration in recognition of the day of establishment of the Abbey of the Everyman in Dunwall to rid out the witch by going around the Tower playing their music boxes under the disguise of rooting out possible Void worshippers. But it is a monster to plan since her father will writhe and peel and bleed out from his ears under the music, hence requiring a timely mission out of the Tower that will not seem suspicious. 

Though she supposes that that is easier than explaining how she knows the maid is a witch considering no mark is branded on her as such. She wonders if Corvo knows it as well. He may have suggestions to throw her into the spotlight without a splinter of doubt. Perhaps unveiling the so-called sacred rituals and crafting of charms she does in her free time, in which he has come across by accident? The Lord Protector is often considered quite mysterious. 

Emily looks up from where her gaze has fallen in her contemplation to regard the god on her chaise by the window. 

Will he aid? Emily doubts it. It is hardly his business. Witches, he may despise because of their absurd rituals to proclaim their worship to his name and the use of black magic drawn from the void in vexing ways, but they are still acolytes of the Void no doubt. 

The child Empress wonders if she is an acolyte as well, knowing how frequent The Outsider visits to defile all her possessions with the taste of the Void. 

"What is so special about the cup?" She asks him in feinted nonchalance as she turns back to her writings. 

"This is painted." He says as a matter-of-factly. She pauses her pen. She eyes the painted gold vines and flowers of the cup. "Thin steady strokes of much practice, but not in play."

He places the cup upside down in the puddle of tea, where the gold flowers of the cup are shown in her plain view, and disappears in his flair. 

She does not have time to contemplate his actions as he appears again by her side, looking down at her letters and plucking her off-hand note from the bottom of the stack. She had placed it there to impede any prying eyes, given the sensitive nature of court proceedings. Though she knows he would have read it some way, some time, or another. 

She willfully ignores the god as he reads through her letter and focuses on writing her replies. The nature of being a monarch and having monarchy duties is to ensure the productivity of the city is as efficient as possible. And the first step to that is always the Monarch's personal work. Replying to reports of projects she enlisted herself. 

Having the Outsider beside her is truly not helping. 

The entity thumbs through the reports and letters she had set aside to reply to. He messes up the corner of her desk, slowly causing every piece of paperwork and audiograph to be laid astray. 

He does put them back in the perfect order they were before he went through them. That much she appreciates after he left in a vanishing smoke. She did not mind the fact that he had looked at confidential and private letters for he is a god who knows everything. Mostly everything as far as he could have been present for. 

What did bother her, at the end of the day, though, was that he gave little bid 'adieu just before he vanished. 

He bid her a safe trip.

He said, _"Do have fun and keep well on your excursion tomorrow, Empress."_

He of course knows about the carriage ride through Dunwall. But he bid her a safe trip. 

This is her second. He did not wish her a safe trip before her first. He appeared for utterly no reason but to disturb her, talked to her about a problem she already knows, and disappeared with a bid for her safety. 

The Outsider only does things that will spur interesting events. It is how he entertains himself so in light of boredom.

It is a minor observation. A tiny one worth noting. 

Emily shoots to her feet and makes for the upside-down teacup. Her warm fingers trace the lingering cold of The Outsider's touch. Golden vines blossom artfully painted gold flowers. She eyes the immaculate detail of thorns painted on the vines. 

The smell of The Void swathes the entire table and though the chaise that The Outsider sat on is also highly saturated, she feels the tingle of black magic running along the golden lines, brought forth by his tracing. 

She has known that there was a touch of black magic on the cup this morning when she drank from it. She knew it didn't come from the tea, hence why she drank it still. The magic was faint. Like only touched in passing. Emily has never made any direct contact with the witch, merely walking by the rooms as she cleans sullenly. She has never been into her study. And yet, this teacup and the following tea set from this morning had her trace. 

Emily calls for Genevieve. 

The Outsider's actions ring in her mind. Off-putting. Screaming with exigent attention.

* * *

The Outsider greets her with his cold and chill, with the breeze of a sigh cascading across the dark of the room, pushing away the mortal warmth of humanity and replacing the heat with waves of his winter. 

Emily looks up from her knees, huddled close to her body against the immense monstrosity that is the world around her, pressed up the wall in the corner of her room. 

There are no tears in her eyes, just like the previous years. Only this time, she feels it worse in her heart. A deeper, yearning abyss that won't close or shrink the moment it has been stretched open. She doesn't know what time it is, how long it has been since she had retired to her room, nor how long she has left to finish reading and writing replies to reports, finding loopholes in treaties, combing through legislations with a fine comb, and even more so the points of discussion for Parliament the next day. 

It's a little weight she isn't not used to. She has been doing the same things since she was twelve with a Co-regent in the shadows, tackling Empirical subjects from fifteen with a reformed council, thumbing through the same issues since she was eighteen. 

But sometimes, she just comes a little closer to the ground than before and it's just more tiring to hold the weight up with a hunched back and a bent elbow from the metaphorical load. 

She doesn't know why. She thought she would have grown out of the melodramatic mood swings after seventeen with a second attempt on her life, but apparently those assassinations have done nothing but to make her blood rush more in the dark and every time she stared too long at red and white. Maybe it doesn't help that her room is a warm and humid maroon. 

She'll curse her royal designers in her own time, though it'll be a waste of it. 

"Twenty years old, Empress. Would you not spend it even with your father?" 

Ah. Of course, he would say that first. 

"You know that he's in Karnaca." Hashing out the treaties between a dying Duke for whatever the unreliable next son would do to Serkonos, nevermind that Dunwall already has a fifteen-step plan in the imminent fall of the island and everyone pretending that the rest of the region isn't slowly redirecting trade towards the other Isles. Or whatever they can, because Serkonos _still_ has Silver to mine. 

And maybe Corvo is taking his time to steal the Duke blind too and maybe also in the midst of finding anything incriminating to enforce the already obvious inadequacy of the heir to unleash a regimental uproar, but who knows, really. 

He just left Jameson here to keep her safe and companied, and honestly, after twenty years of knowing the man her entire life, she wonders why she hasn't had him executed for skilled and masterful manipulation and blackmail against The Empress of the Isles. Maybe its because the rest of the Parliament would revolt at the order, seeing how he culls her workaholic proclivities to aid their pace of work. But who would claim to know? 

Not like there is anything to blackmail. Everything she has and enjoys is but merely a temporary lull of comfort in the shark and bloody world she is born into. A break between her schedules only causes work to be pushed back. An excuse from a function causes rumors to be addressed. A lapse in a meeting raises concerns in her ability to rule. 

Even more so now, as she leans so haplessly against her walls with no will to move despite every thought screaming imperatively at her to do so before time runs out for her to finish her tasks. Some part within her still hangs so fervently on the belief that she will be able to accomplish her work early before the morning with hours to spare. Like always.

The forward-looking Empress who thought of the ten-year restoration plan for Gristol, thinker of solutions to problems that wouldn't even be hinted until months later, sitting here, cold in the corner, mourning the loss of time and nothing doing anything about it but lamenting uselessl—

The room plunges into darkness as The Outsider's restless hands decided to flick her desk lamp off. 

She doesn't say anything, merely heaving another brittle, empty sigh. 

There is nothing to say when her mind is already screaming incoherently for her to stand and work. To dust herself off and to pull a focused mind back onto track. To stop wallowing and wading so stupidly in a sea of nothingness that just isn't there.

She's a high-functioning mess, and since she's already doing the mess part of her name, why not start on the functioning part? 

Why not do anything? 

Why isn't she functioning like any other working person out there, like Alexi who's always doing a hundred and twenty percent in the guarding of a useless monarch, like Jameson Curnow who's only two years older and a respected advisor in his own right with everyone pretending like he isn't a better ruler, like her Father who won a sword competency battle at sixteen and able to continue being a Royal Protector _and_ Spymaster even after the death of his heart? She has hers still beating in her chest but why does it only seem to weigh her down? 

A shiver crawls up her skin, and Emily unclenches her jaw from the gritting clamp grinding her teeth. 

The Outsider peels back her fingers from where they have dug into her temple, and she opens her eyes to his alabaster face, deep black opal boring into her empty soul, her desk light dusting his black hair yellow from over the folding screens. 

"Pray tell, why do you think that this is a good spot for you to mourn in?" 

Is she mourning? 

Perhaps. 

No one ever addressed the panic mania that came with the loss of her Mother. The bitter thrust into the spotlight on a stage with wolves as the audience, the squash of every emotion to make sure she gets the Empire back on its feet again before burning out into what she is today. And would be forever. 

Her Father tried. Eye crinkling smiles with tears unspilled lining them. Always making the effort to know whether she's doing fine, whether she's holding up. Whether or not she misses her Mother like he does. Because every time he asks about her wellbeing, she thinks back to the nights at the Hound Pits Pub where she would linger at his door to hear his nightmares about losing and missing and loving Jessamine and feel nothing because her mind told her not to, and she'll forever say that she's fine and she doesn't miss her Mother as much as he does because she's a forward-looker and The Isles doesn't have time for that. 

And he won't ever ask so in-depth about her feelings ever again and she'll only mourn the lack of warm fuzzy closeness with her only parent in her own time because she appreciates his person so much she would rather burst in the feeling than fumble and mess up the already tangible relationship they have. 

Emily had layered her emotions underneath a heavy fortress ever since she knew that every whim caused by them would be catered to at the expanse of her Mother. Every action of hers would be scrutinised and compared to the likes of both her parents and she made sure every feature of herself would be under a veil that only she can lift. It allowed her to be efficient, still does, at a lesser scale. She is an Empress first and a little woman second. A respectable person in her own right and compared to nothing else. She needs to be just that. 

She needs to be _better_ . Because it was _her_ Mother that died. _Her_ city that fell into utter chaos. _Her_ competency to reign on the line. _Her_ age, experience, and knowledge, against _her_. 

And _by The Void_ , she has done so much and so little that she is doing nothing but mindless work through directionless days. 

She still laments every inaction she takes as each hour goes by with the knowledge she has done nothing for her future. _Nothing_. Because for the past eight years, she had only been bringing back Dunwall to her former glory and maintaining The Isles as it is and pulling Gristol to the magnificence it _should_ be if her Mother was still alive. Everything is as it should be and nothing is better than it is meant to be. 

But is she mourning? 

Yes. Probably. 

Her Mother has been dead for eight years. She would still be dead next year, and the year after that and forever after. And Emily hasn't done anything for Dunwall to make her Mother be proud of her. 

She looks down and away from The Outsider's prying eyes, feeling so old and downtrodden, like a used war steed coming to the end of its carrier.

"How old were you, when you became a god, Outsider?" Her voice breezes over her knees. The Entity gently takes her hands to his lips. She can feel them move against her fingers as he breathes ice into them, pushing away her heated despondency. Empty comforts, fading into nothingness.

"There was no time keeping then, Emily. I wouldn't know. I hardly remember those times." 

Ah.

That makes sense. There's that then. 

She raises her eyes, peering over him with strained muscles from doing nothing. There is a weight on her shoulders. The title of the world, bearing down on her crumbling frame. The knowledge that she has not done her eight-year-olds will of being strong and steady without a crack, proud. 

She is well aware of the changes that time and chaos have wrought on her being, but it still leaves the taste of bitter disappointment so sharp on the back of her throat.

"Would you carry me to my desk?" Her words spill without a filter, and she doesn't care for it, ready for the rejection to come by, waiting for the words to fall from his mouth. 

They don't. 

She looks up to find his silence, sitting in hunches at the back of his abysmal eyes. Contemplation, stone-cold on his face. 

“Ink and Parchment, Empress. Do you wish to drown in astrament on your birthday?” He asks rhetorically, huffing a breath over her fingertips before tucking them back to her chest. She clenches her jaw as an arm slides under her knees and another around her waist, trying to sink into his cold instead of the blood-curdling screams of inadequacy physically prickling the skin of her neck by curling into his body of frigid ice.

The Outsider hoists her up into air effortlessly without the jostle of a strand of hair, spinning to face the outside world so terrifying. She takes an emptying breath, laying her head on his clavicle, only able to watch as he walks them out into the light of her room beyond the shadows of her folding screens. 

"Is there really a need for celebrating the day you were born?" She asks, curling into his neck, a finger tapping against the metal button of his coat, feeling him so solid despite the smoke twisting around his skin, twisting around her. 

"When you agonise over your living as much as you do, Empress, then I suppose not." She feels the rumble of his throat when he speaks, a fingertip moving to trail down the line of his jaw in a confounded sense of detachment, attention raptured by the details that the proximity that they now share entails. Perhaps it is her melancholy that inhibits her gratefulness, but she merely feels the waste in resources whenever any of the Aristocrats push for a ball in her name for whatever spectacular event. 

The Outsider carries her across the threshold of her imperial apartment, across the length of the room, past the wide panes of her windows and closer towards the only source of fragile light illuminating the threatening waves of darkness.

He sets her down on her chair, old wood and worn leather, gently placing her feet to find the solidarity of ground and pulling his lingering cold away from her waist. 

When he moves to flank her side, she already misses the lull of his winter skin. 

Emily stares down at the array of documents blanketing her table, stacks of organised mess sprawled across the rich wood. Her pen is secure in its holder, right where she left it before she had collapsed under the weight of her meddlesome emotions that evening. 

The Outsider pays her inaction no heed, moving to mess the systemised arrangement her paperwork in his usual fashion of unbounded secrecy, without a single regard for the unspoken prohibition of perusing through restricted Official and Imperial Documents. He is a god, after all. What are the rules and regulations of mortal men to him? 

Exhaustion lines her bones, with her mind spinning through sludge inside her head. 

Emily pulls out a blank paper to outline the details of her deepest condolences to the Duke of Serkonos in regards to the recent passing of his father even if it hasn't come (But will. Everyone is just dreading it), and to inquire about the continuation of their trading treaty, knowing between the both of them that this Duke would ignore the letter in favor of his gains. Because what need is an Empress to a totalitarian dictator of an Isle of her Empire? 

She pulls her pen from its holder, and she breathes in, to gather her empty heart and her burnt-out mind. 

"Why do you mourn your Mother?"

The burst of fiery outrage and rush of blood in her ears is warranted. 

The audacity to ask this question with such an obvious answer, insulting her in one fell swoop with meagre six-words, as if he hasn't seen her fall and tumble and spill her soul into a black tar pit of grief within the past eight years. 

She was so ready to rebuke, to scream and maybe tear and feel so hurt about how he never saw her constant state of dying and living in a floating limbo ever since she was fourteen like he wasn't present when she went through the burning aftermath of ebbing adrenaline and plunge into grief, to so easily fall quickly into hate and scorn for this entity who, of course, would never know or remember the agonising taste of grief and sorrow like the recalcitrant implacable and emotionally vacuous being he is. 

But she freezes instead, pen nib blotting the blank paper in a black splotch because the fire of her rage and the drop swing into purple hate is doused in the cold water of deeper realisation so quickly that she reels on the inside. 

Emily stills. 

Why _does_ she mourn her Mother? 

Her Mother was the epitome of a Just and Compassionate ruler who placed her subjects' first and ahead of everything else, who valued in-depth sincerity against spontaneous valiance. 

She was the opposite of Emily. Opposite the sharp edges and manipulative undertones and underlying subterfuge, and especially the ten-step five moves ahead with at least eight layers of strategy game that Emily plays. The one that turns every goal of a legislature to heed the needs of her Empire, the one that started the reformation of the Privy Council when she was fourteen after her first assassination attempt and overturned the entire legislative Branch into a Dominion Commonwealth disguised as a Democratic Sovereignity by the time she was eighteen. 

Jessamine Kaldwin was a touch puritanical, often annoyed by wretched Overseers but nonetheless faithful to The Abbey, holding high morals in her standards and ensuring the upkeep of them by being so lenient and _blind_. Her mother was not harsh. She did not slack, nor overlook any form of aggression against her virtues. She was merely blinded, by the effort of her Usurpers to blind her, those untrusting her compassion and projected naivety and going out of their way to keep their workings so tightly veiled that not even Corvo was able to uncover the plot behind her death until he met the Assassin who took her life. 

But her Mother was _kind_. Absurdly magnanimous and benevolent in light of immorality done towards her. Felonious acts she never let slide if done to the Empire, but those attempted assassinations that Corvo had foiled, all resulted in merely a throw into Coldridge rather than capital punishment if the Assassin wasn't dead already. 

Emily is far from the pious woman her Mother was. _Far_ from it. 

When The Regenters attempted to cull her when she was fourteen, she was so close to sending them to their deaths after weeding out what information she was satisfied to receive. She was in a haze of burning anger, because it was her life that they were ending, her Empire that they were going to throw into upheaval and anarchy, her people that was going to suffer. She was appalled by their selfish desire for authoritarianism, and she wanted to dissuade any sympathisers from the same path of self-righteous Empirical scale destruction. 

And then they said that it was impertinent for her to not show the leniency that her Mother would have. 

_Her_ _Mother,_ who was killed on pristine white marble, blood pooling and chilling on a cool day, stark against achromatic stone. Dying and _dead_ , with the portrait of the orchestrate being painted less than a few feet away.

The resulting breakdown from the indecision between two justified actions was a _magnificent_ , monumental sight no one but smoke and cold ashes had the pleasure of watching. And in the end, lives were spared and she was hailed to be a _Judicious_ and Wise ruler, likened to the magnanimity of her Mother. 

Her mother who _died_ at _their_ hands for being too compassionate. 

Emily is not her Mother. She wants to be, to be the righteous and moral woman that her Mother was and wanted her to be. 

And more than anything, she mourns her Mother's death, grieves for the loss of life, but most of all, lamented the woman she could have been in a world where she was veiled and blinded from blood-stained teeth and hidden daggers. A woman, greatly revered for her lack of requiring the backhanded totalitarian application of willpower and bladed words. A woman, of sunshine and trust and easy contentment. 

Emily lowers her pen, a hand moving to her desk light. 

Darkness swarms the room when she flicks the lamp off. She pulls her knees up onto the chair, bundling herself into a ball of existential nothing, The Outsider at her side, still thumbing through her brief. 

"Because she was everything I should have been." She whispers to the cold air, placing her chin on her legs, arms curling tighter around herself, feeling so much older than she is. "Everything I am not."

A cold finger trails down her cheek. She thinks to the darkness beyond a silver cage. A quiet promise, never to be fulfilled. 

She leans into his touch, closing her eyes and savouring his cold. 

"But are you any less for not being?" 

Emily opens her eyes again to darkness. Swirling shadows curling around her shoulders, smoke and ashes flitting over her skin. 

"Have you not wished to be more than a god, Outsider?" 

She feels him lean down. His finger trails away from her cheek, the arm reaching around her neck, a blissful chill against the heat of the night. He curls around her at the moment, lips pressed against the top of her head. 

"Fair point."

He bursts, vanishing in his common flair. 

She falls back to write a useless letter to a useless Duke, burning through her pen by the time the sun wakes. 

* * *

She is sixteen. Her mother's birthday was yesterday. In fifteen days, it will be her death anniversary. 

There are already plans for the procession to be laid out for the remembrance. Her mother's death anniversary will be marked with the flags at half-mast, speeches for her and for the people whose lives were lost during the man introduced rat Plague during The Rat Coup, some medals of valour for the people who have contributed most during the time of civil unrest, some important words for future. 

Emily would know the full details of the procession in the following afternoon when Advisor Wainwright meets her for the plans for the building of The _ISS Jessamine Kaldwin_ , a voyager cruise to be named in the memory of her mother. Alistair Fletcher had sent the ideations of different designs of the cruise a few weeks ago, and Wainwright already has a four-year timeline planned in a strict structure for the entire affair, and neither wants any hitch in the goal to launch the ship on the fifteenth anniversary of her Mother's death. 

Not that it wouldn't do for them to have some slack to allow for human inconsistency and natural errors, but at least some people have similar outlooks in life. 

She is winding through the Tower, taking in the inside corridors of churrigueresque columns and paned windows, delectable paintings of the various breathtaking scenery of whatever sunset or mountain range that shouldn't be confined to canvas in the first place hung on lacquered walls. 

The Tower is empty today, with the post-mark visiting of Serkonian Dignitaries the morning burning through brunch. She knows distinctively that her servants are preparing for the monthly Grand Assembly meeting in the following week, hearing those excited whispers of finally being able to pull out whatever lavish skilled work they were hired for again, when she swept past the servants' corridor. 

It hits her slow. Very slowly. 

It starts when she walks into her study, the scent of old books and still burning Jasmine and Sage wax from the morning invading her senses as she retrieves her Council brief, filled with documents from the Parliament and Council, organised by Jameson for her ease of review. The work case weighs in her hand, even if it was only filled with stacks of paper. 

It grows when the lighting of the Office reminds her of a time too long ago when the sunshine had shone just right on her Mother's face, and she looked so content and happy with her bubbly daughter babbling on and on incoherently about a dream where she played hide-and-seek in the gardens as she did her heavy-duty work. 

Laughter in her ears. The bright sun curling the edges of a charmed smile. 

_"My, Emily, what fun dreams you have."_ ringing in her ears. 

When she leaves the room for her own, the world floats in a hazy fog and she drifts from one end of the corridor to the other, walking up steps and trailing down carpet without concern or care for where she is headed. 

Her heart plunges. 

The brief in her hands a loaded weight, and dread pulls in every corner of her mouth, sinking the blood-red core of her soul into a gaping hole of melancholic restlessness. 

It swirls, a whirlpool, when Emily finds familiarity in walking by the lounge, soft promises of the future echoing in her ears. The promise to help her through the reigns of ruling. The promise to stand by her side as a guide in a world of sharks and veiled insults. The promise to always be with her forever, so they can be a perfect little family when young Emily becomes Empress and is finally able to decree Corvo the official title of her Father, so Mother and Corvo won't ever need to sneak around the dark ever again, even if their tales of adventure were so entertaining to hear about. 

It bursts into a spinning collision, when her mind reminds her that her family consists of two, not three, now. 

The mania in her chest swirls. A bubble in her throat, pressure in her ears. 

She climbs the stairs silently, with a growing black tornado spinning into life at the bottom of her stomach. 

The world is muted. Everything is grey around her. Her room seems further away than before. She doesn't care. When she reaches the landing, she merely just drag her legs towards the corridor. 

A familiar grey corridor, with the light being white and the shadows being black, and everything, everything being so colourless and bland.

If she was still alive, her mother would be thirty-nine this year. She would have streaks of grey in her lustrous black hair, glinting yellow under the light of every chandelier she walks under. Her face will be lined with wrinkles, both accentuating her beauty and cutting through it. Her crows' feet will start to appear sooner than most middle-aged women because of the stress that comes with her work. Her frowning mouth wrinkles will start to sink, with how she would always frown at absurd policies and notice report letters that she comes across. 

Her mother would have been at her peak, banishing the Rat Plague in Dunwall, rebuilding otherwise destroyed Districts of the city, re-establishing stronger ties and treaties with the rest of Isles again. Her mother would have been viewed as a formidable figure; a woman who has been usurped, taking her throne back from oppressive dictators who didn't know how to run an Empire, and restoring the Age of Dunwall again in one fell swoop. 

Her mother would have been here. In the Tower, in her study, in the library, in the sitting room, in the Chapel, in her bedroom. She would have been here for sixteen-year-old Emily to run to, wherever she was, whatever she was doing. Here for sixteen-year-old Emily who is currently in the process of experiencing the beginnings of a manic attack. 

But she isn't. 

The Tower is empty. Devoid despite being so full of servants and Parliament members and Grand Guards. Empty and numb, with no joy nor passion. Just the muted colour of warm grey in the midst of black and white. 

Her mother isn't here. She hasn't been for the past six years. 

She didn't celebrate any birthdays with Emily for the past half of a decade, she didn't blow any candles nor cut any cake, or even sat beside her and talked about the massive unnecessity of a big event that is the celebration of her birthday. 

The raw burning in her chest grows with intensity, bubbling up her throat, and sizzling right at the back of her mouth. She knows her breathing is starting to get faster out of her control, with her back straight and her shoulders tightening with tension. 

Her mother had just left her in a grey world for six years and she will continue to leave her here for the rest of her life. 

She doesn't stop walking. She just walks a little brisker as her breathing thins. 

There is a bubble growing in her ears as she enters her room. It snuffs every pitch of sound out into a muffled mess. She drops the brief at the door. Uncaring for it.

Her spine is locked tight with her ribcage. Her chest is not expanding for her to breathe. The Empress doesn't care. The bubble is bigger in her ears as she peels off her coat, leaving it on her bed. She can feel fire sizzling on her skin as she unravels the tie on her neck and when she unbuttons her cuffs. 

She is a volcano. With ash on her tongue and smoke in her ears. She can feel her ears burn and bleed with pressure, as her neck is tangled in the snake that is a bottomless pit of despair, crawling up into her brain, ready to wretch her head back into a hole. 

There is a fire setting alight her skin, itchy and burning unrelentingly, growing with sparkling heat. 

Emily slowly sinks to her knees, by her bed. She breathes in deep. Heavy. Her hands cover her ears, nails digging into the skin on the back of her head. She doesn't feel the pain of anything. All she feels is the building swirl of the tornado in her lower body, a sinkhole of eternal emptiness in her chest, a volcano of immense pressure in her head. 

She doesn't care for what time it is. She doesn't care for what she has to do. She doesn't care for what guard may be watching on the roof or whether her father is hiding in a corner trying to see if she was safe. She just curls into a ball by the side of her bed. Palms over her ears, fingers over her neck, knees tucked between her elbows and under her chin. 

And _by The Void_ , does she pray so fervently for herself to be culled. 

Her mania threatens to boil over as she clutches her head tighter. She clenched her teeth, jaw tensing every muscle in her head. There is no pain. Just numbness. An abyss in the pit of her chest. 

There is no sound, just the bubble in her head and the knowledge that she is imagining it. She can't get it out of her head any other way even still. It is not just a shrill, but the pitched vibration that comes with hearing a flash of sharp lightning. 

Shivering down her neck, all her hair raised. All from a sound only she can hear in her mind.

"No, no, no, no, _no_." 

She can't hear herself. Her words don't ground. They just hang in the air, a pitiful lament. A whispered plea. 

No one here to help her. She doesn't want anyone to see her like this. Her guards will keep comments amongst themselves. Her servants will care just a little more. Her father cannot see this. None of the Council members can know of this. 

She just wishes her mother was still here. Just for her to hang on to. Just someone who will put her first whenever she needs them. Just selfishly, here just for her. Her mother who will hug her tight, whisper sweet nothings, tuck her into bed. Guide her, remind her to take a step back, remind her to be strong, remind her to stay afloat. 

Her father would be the one shoulder she would cry on, but it is that slip in her conduct that will cause his view of her to falter. His view, of a strong-willed daughter hefting an empire slowly into betterment, broken upon a tear to make him realise that his daughter is under immense pressure and will wish to whisk it away. 

She wants to break. To shatter freely like glass will. She will not. But it is still scoring her from within in the process anyways. 

It is in that process that will drive her mad with agonising mania, wishing for death and being granted with even more toil. Whirlpools in her mind and thunder ringing in her ears. A bottomless abyss in her abdomen and a whale on her chest. 

Emily clutches her head tighter, her nails breaking the skin of her neck, her eyes squeezed shut with tears. She hugs herself a little closer to her bed, and she waits and she waits and she waits for the shrill to go away. To leave like it always will. 

A chill brushes by her hair, cool on her skin, and soothing on her forehead. 

It is such a bittersweet release. 

Her hands fly to her face to cover a horrible sob that results from an aborted scream choking her throat. Her tears run like a stream, a mess everywhere in her hair and she doesn't care. There is madness in her ears and it's trying to send her into a blind spiral for her own death. 

Her head is pushed back, to nestle against a cold clothed clavicle. She is shaking in her tears, unstoppable hiccups wrecking through her body with the torment of a swirling cosmos threatening to detonate in her chest. 

Always threatening, always on the brink. 

A cold chin on her hair, a chilled hand soothing her forehead. 

She tries to quieten, but she knows that the bubble will just renew if she pressures it so. If she squashes it out without allowing any breathing life, it will bite back with a new vigor that will send her spiralling deeper from recovery from this spell. 

Icy hands bring her own away from her face when her cries finally sputter out into quiet streams and heaving hiccups. 

Light does not meet her eyes as she had expected it to. 

Shadows invade her vision, swirling around them in a light flurry. Grey stone at her feet, spiraling around them in jutted edges out onto a ledge that only leads downwards, wood from hidden trees crackles out with reaching hands into nothingness. 

They are in The Void, with granite under them, howling wind in their faces, and rivets of whalesong in their ears. 

Emily feels the last of her tears drip onto her cheek, stunned into silence. A seize on her heart. 

She turns, craning her neck to meet the far eyed gaze of The Outsider at her back. 

"Why?" Her voice cracks, not even able to muster a proper sentence.

The Leviathan lets go of her hands and vanishes in a burst of smoke and white ash. It is only then that she is privy to the sight behind her. 

An army of hooded stone figures at the base of lowering stone steps. Huddling in perfect lines and strict arrangement, parted down the middle for whatever procession they were standing in ceremony for. Terraced spiral walls hold them in, leading down to a blackness she cannot see through. 

At the head of the platform where the stone statues are facing, just out from the corner of her eyes, a glowing fiery amber illuminating a worn slab of granite stone. She only sees the end of the slab, with the jutting stones like walls spiralling to block the rest of the view. 

The Outsider appears to the side, sitting on the smoothed terrace of stone along the adjacent wall, waiting to unravel a mystery in the grey. 

Emily picks herself off her feet, rubbing her eyes to get what tears that have been stunned out of her in surprise, and pats her cheek to smear the drying tear tracks away. She moves to get closer to the audience of The Outsider, ready for a story he will tell to push all her mortal, inconsequential, yet still agonising, feelings away. 

"Four thousand years ago, an orphan was cut and left to bled out atop this slab, all because stars aligned in coincidence." 

She is sixteen in a world with councils more cutthroat than killers. Words sharper than blades and louder than any battle cry. Plans drafted in shadows, brought only into the light of segregation. Belief is more poisonous, far more treacherous, than philosophy. 

She looks up, at the boy not much older than her. 

Beliefs, able to spill more blood than facts. 

"This is where your life ended and where it began, Outsider? Where you were made."

Inscrutable eyes pin on her as she walks towards the cracked slab, revealing a hooded figure much like the audience beneath the steps, raising a knife above its head, with a dead tree curling behind it. Branches like sharp claws, they twist and spiral back into The Void. 

"I thought I would find an escape." His voice echoes like a whisper around her. She knows he has disappeared into smoke and shadows again, for he appears beside her as she comes up to the illuminated slab, a finger trailing down the curve of the odd knife. "Right up until the end." 

His chill envelopes her, like a jealous lover pushing away what lingering warmth of her world still sticking onto her skin. She savours it, a fervent comfort against sweltering and stifling heat that was mania and a panic attack. She doesn't lean against him, to leech what cold that is constantly emanating from his skin. She merely breathes, exhaling, and inhaling with a conscious effort to calm disquieted nerves. 

He disappears beside her but appears again quick enough without letting her feel the absence of his frore. He lays stretched a top and across the slab, a hand raised to the pointed tips of the knife she now inspects closer to be a two-bladed dagger. 

Emily looks down at him. A little hollow in her chest where her feelings should be swirling turbulently in. 

"Did you even try to escape?" She asks, daringly, intrepidly. "Did you even try to evade the knife?" 

Her hand raises, and she watches in dissociation as her fingers brush the cold sliver of his neck, uncovered by his coat. Velvet skin soothingly frigid to her touch. 

"I did. I fought. The ropes only cut my skin, Empress. And when the blade touched my throat, I knew it was too late."

Eyes shift. Black opal of abysmal depth, capturing her in a mesmerisation lidded by fluttering lashes. 

His hand falls from the blade hanging above them, and he does not push away her fingers as they make their way in a trail lining his jaw. 

It is immoral. 

To slaughter a child. To bleed dry a body. 

But it is nothing. Nothing less than the inhumane trials of The Abbey that she had known since her ascension to the throne. To choose an overseer, stars must align with the right child, and every other that had been dragged out of their homes would be slaughtered to make way for the singular, red-painted chosen one who is viewed to have ichor in their veins in place of the morose maroon that runs in every other. 

But it is four thousand years ago, to exsanguinate a youth in belief. 

Should it be done now by a similar sacrilegious order of the same power, would anyone revolt against the religious order of the world? Would anyone be able to utter an objection against The Abbey? 

She removes her hand from the icy skin, pulling back to give the god a human sense of space. 

If no one is able to protest against The Abbey for taking away their children and is instead honored to give the life of their child for a sacred cause, then Emily supposes, that there will be no one. No one to prevent the same religious sacrifice in the name of an otherworldly purpose. 

It is this, that Emily falters in her belief for the righteous and infallible order of the world. 

People shun from the touch of The Void. The branding of a believer as a renegade, a sinner. The adept followers of The Everyman brewing the timorous nature of Void Worshippers, forcing them to hide in the shadows like the infernal entity they believe in lest they are culled at a burning stake or beheaded by the guillotine. 

And yet, yet these righteous followers pledge their religion to an order that mass murders children deemed unworthy of living should they not be chosen as the Overseer of The Abbey. It is hypocrisy at its finest. 

Emily looks down at her hands. A muted beige, pink with health, unblemished skin stares right back at her. 

She touches her own throat, closing her eyes to feel the imaginative invisible draw of a blade down the left of her neck, cold to touch, burning a trail. Her head tilts to the side and she feels ice blazing down the nerves under her skin. 

Blood spilling. Pouring out in rivets and ribbons, splattering across stone faces and pattering down her fingers. Her veins emptying, and filling, with blackened ichor twisting like shadows and white ashes in place of maroon red cruor. 

Emily opens her eyes. She sees the twin points of the double-bladed knife above her and the cold stone of the sacrificial altar underneath her back. 

"Your blood ran out, and you became a god. Would you have asked for anything less?" 

The Outsider stares into The Void, with ichor running under the pale pallor of his skin and crystalline smoke twirling around his body. He looks down at her from where he stands beside the slab, a hand raising to her head. 

Fingers on her eyelids. He closes them. She sees nothing but the stillness in the dark. 

"I wonder." 

When she opens them again, the warmth of her world threatens to set her on fire, and the ceiling of her four-poster bed greets her. 

She is empty, with neither blood nor emotion running in her body. A grief-sized hole carved in her chest. 

She is sixteen. Her mother has been dead for six years. Emily starts to wear her hair in a twist, pulling her straightened hair away from an unblemished neck, giving her father a stuttered step in his walk when he lays eyes upon her for the first time in the hairstyle, and Wainwright a smile when he goes through the plan for the cruise in her name. 

The Outsider, when he visits in the dark of every other night, watching her as she works through her insomnia, he still smiles like a cat who knows far too much for anyone to be comfortable with because he is one. 

* * *

**_"_ **

_The moon is bright on her skin._

_She is not._

_Dark circles line the underneath of her eyes. Stark against the milky sheen of her deathly hue. Her lips are white, empty without the red of mortal blood._

_The world nearly lost The Empress today._

_And he, he stands here in silence by her bedside, trailing a finger on the back of her hand as he waits for her coherency because not even The Void will meddle with the likes of mortal functions._

_Poison still runs in her veins. He sees a hundred futures where she succumbs to it. He sees a hundred less that she doesn't. He should find himself fortunate to be in the one that she lives beyond her twentieth decade. He doesn't. There are many more he hasn't seen. Many more possibilities that have not come to pass by. But he knows well that the steadfast path of self-destruction that this woman always seem to take will only end in one outcome._

_He is no human, nor can he perceive the complexity of emotions, but he still finds it in himself to want to show care for this woman, whatever time she has left._

_Care enough that she will understand on her own terms that it would be the extent of the love he can show when he is nothing but shadows and cold smoke._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @Meggiee  
> You're a godsent. Thanks for the comment. This chapter was on you. *cue Leo's champagne toast*


	3. He is a constant, she is not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She grows older. She's a little more tired. It's the start of a spiral, honestly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Its Unbeta'd still. I need to include this in the tags someday.  
> It's a short chapter. There's Alexi/Emily fluff in here.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored.

* * *

**_"_ **

_There is no court today, a welcomed relief, though there are still reports to read and listen to._ _Such as the one being verbally delivered by Officer Beurnwry currently over her desk, telling her of the curbing situation behind the Blood-fly infestations now finally being culled._

 _The Outsider, curse this_ man _, is still reading her letters with his gelid shadows chilling her inks, standing by her side in her full view and in none of the officer's sight, exercising his Void powers within his own vindication._

_She keeps a structured and impassive face, nodding when she needs to and asking for her Officer's clarifications when he doesn't, as a cool fidgeting finger slides up and down her naked thigh._

_Fidgeting with an innocence as if she isn't in this situation because of him._

_When Officer Beurnwry leaves, she glares down at The Outsider where he had knelt to place a kiss on her bare knee, glowering as he peers up at her with mischievous yellow eyes._

**_"_ **

**_Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be._ **

* * *

She comes into the room with him sitting on her table, looking at her private letters which she has yet to open after a full day. 

"The Head of the League of Imperial Protectors seeks to ask permission for your courtship." He starts conversationally before letting the paper fall back on the desk. 

It is her eighteenth birthday. Corvo decided to surprise her with an assassination attempt that morning on the way to court. It was a test of aptitude and capability after his nightly training around Dunwall since the Regenters' attack, and needless to say, she passed his test to a certain extent. 

Her father had gone ahead of her to parliament session, as usual, leaving Alexi by her side. And on her way down to the Parliament, he ambushed her in a Whaler's attire, jumping in through the window, setting off a smoke out bomb as an element of surprise, knocked out most of her surrounding Officers and distracted Alexi with, unbeknownst to the Second captain, doppelgangers of himself disguised under Whalers' suits. 

He then engaged Emily in a two versus one melee fight with another doppelganger, which she dispersed without trouble. Her Royal Protector pulled no swings nor tricks to get the better of her in contrast. He used their environment to his advantage, pushed her into a corner, placed her at an arms-length, threw glasses, and used every opening she gave unwillingly. It did not help the fact that she was only armed with the short knife she carries around in her boot. 

Emily figured the ruse out when he engaged her, having learnt his styles of fighting by heart. He also traversed the area with familiarity and knew which objects to throw and which not to. Though he continued his assault on her with renewed vigor especially after she called him out on the ambush. 

With him, Emily was put at disadvantages. Close quarters combat was his forte. He moved with ease in the confined space of the corridor and the study. He knew her fighting styles just like she'd his. This factor in her favor was made null, however, when he started to seamlessly blend each of his styles at a pace she could not follow. 

In the end, she was only able to disengage him by using his inability to use the Void's powers against him. She defenestrated him when his back was turned to the window with a kick. He caught the ledge like she knew he would, and a knife poised at his jugular forced him to surrender. 

She was commended for being able to overcome the attack and made him proud of how she won a full battle against him. She was also chided however, as she was unable to hinder him enough to find an escape for The Empress should never risk her safety by fighting. Nonetheless, he was still proud. 

The First Captain and his Officers that were knocked unconscious were reprimanded consequently after they woke, having been rendered useless in such a short time. Alexi was praised for keeping up with the doppelganger, the one which "fled" when Corvo was thrown out of the study window. But she was also chided for the lack of ability to protect her Empress and the training with her fellow squadmates. 

Corvo rewarded Emily with a day of uninterrupted rest and free time to do whatever she wished within the city, and the reluctant permission to drink as much wine as she liked during the court held to celebrate her birthday. 

But despite the eventful action-packed morning, the evening of court was rather tame. She merely spoke with various interested royal inventors who enjoyed her idealist mind about the fantastical wonders of the Silvergraphs that Kirin Jindosh of Karnaca had invented, and drank not even a full glass of either the red and the sparkling white wine offered at the champagne fountains. 

_Rather tame_ , she had thought, as she retired for the night after only being at her birthday celebration for a total of half an hour, for appearance, cake cutting, and fireworks. She left immediately after watching a drunk Lady Esma Boyle being accidentally knocked into the Tower's courtyard fountain by an equally intoxicated Lord Pavlo Pratchett. Emily, of course, did not hear the resounding drunken arguments and screams as she ascended the servants' stairs, far from the action. 

And now she enters her room, in nothing but her undergarments with The Outsider perusing through her private letters. 

She doesn't know whether to be insulted that he hardly gave her glance, or that he is looking through her letters. But remembering how old this Great Leviathan is made her sober up. He is four thousand years old, nevermind what he has seen, but of course, she wouldn't be the first that he has appeared to in such a state of undress. Emily daresay, she wouldn't be in the worst state of undress than whatever woman or man he ever had the pleasure of seeing. 

So she does not stop at the doorway of her apartment. She walks in as if she is still fully clothed, heading towards her dresser with every righteous formal purpose. 

"My private affairs are hardly your concern, Outsider." She reminds him. He wouldn't care for her words, even still. He merely feigns interest in the workings of the Humankind and their delicate drama. 

The young Empress having a non-regional suitor proposing courtship? Well, he wouldn't be the first in history. There are worse scandals and The chthonic deity had regaled those stories just as much. 

Emily moves across the room to her dresser, where it sits by a wall of windows, past her bed, past her desk. On the furthest end from the door of the bathroom like an inside joke made by the Grand designers who planned the layout of her private quarters with her father. 

Folding screens line the corner of the wall without windows, for her to change her clothes in the privacy of possible spying eyes, especially from the watch guards on the roof of the Tower. She does not bother with them, in the middle of the night where her quarters are barely lit with only the lamp on her desk switched on. 

She sheds her bathrobe as she reaches her dresser, pulling off the silk and sliding it over the chair of her vanity without looking into the mirror and stands in all the glory of her naked skin, her back to The Outsider at the corner across the room where her desk is. Her breast bindings, of course, shield the most of her flesh along with the dark silk shorts. 

The silk robe slides off the chair like the slippery material it is. She bends to retrieve it, resigned to simply lay it over the seat before walking to the dresser. She is opening her dresser, heading straight for her sleep attire, when the chill of the room subsides and is replaced by the warmth of the night. 

It looks like she wouldn't need to sleep so decently after all. 

She drops the black silk and closes her dresser to walk to her now-empty desk in just her undergarments, feeling the absence of the frost of The Void deep in her bones as she pulls her mind together to work. 

How peculiar, that Outsider.

* * *

Alexi beds her on the cold night of her twenty-first birthday. 

It is several weeks after Emily realised that she had grown bored of wine and champagne and every other alcohol. Perhaps even sick of it, though she knows she does not drink as often as Corvo thinks she does. She has this realisation again currently, as she is sneaking another glass of ginger ale that the one server is walking around with a tray of. 

Not quite nearly enough of those men here, truly. 

This is a ball held in favor of her coming-of-age celebration and yet there is not enough of what she wants. 

It is a celebration open to all of Dunwall, a celebration of both the ten years of wondrous restorations during her reign and her adulthood. But while it is open to all of Dunwall, really, only carefully selected and respected citizens of Dunwall proper are invited into the Crystal Ballroom, aside from the houses of aristocrats that are guaranteed to attend. 

The gate of the Tower District is opened for the evening to allow citizens to stroll into the now heavily decorated garden that is also offering food and beverages, but that is the extent of the lavishness they will have in comparison to the accommodation indoors. 

Emily can't imagine what her people are thinking. They will come to the garden, they will overlook the gazebo that stands on the cliff, they will see the plaque in remembrance of her mother, they will perhaps even dance to the music of the lively musicians and enjoy the delectable food that the celebration planners have thought to provide, but they will not, in sad disappointment, see a glimpse of their Empress. 

Not that she doesn't wish to be there, but Jameson had recommended her to stay indoors for at least long enough to meet most of the Aristocrats before going outside, he spoke in _such_ a suggestive manner that she couldn't just ignore. So thoughtful of him to remind her to play nice to prideful and self-obsessed benefactors. 

In comparison to the outside gardens, the inside is more of a cold celebration, much like any other, she has ever attended since young. But perhaps it is even colder, with it being her coming of age, and so many, so many houses of Aristocrats looking at her and coming to her with thinly veiled deliberations, vying to put their esteemed thoroughbred sons on her hand. 

But also most of all, looking at her like she is the Bluejawed fish caviar atop the finely curated paupiette whale meat that they are serving in here. 

It is a wonder how she still feels irritated by the heat of the indoor party when everyone around her is eyeing her more sharply than normal with cold contemplations. 

Every single Lord and noble son she had approached and have been approached by for mindless word exchanges for the past half an hour felt scripted. She is bewildered by how her court thinks that grooming their sons specifically to be suitors for her is a good use of their time. Half of them look as if they'd rather be part of her royal navy than a royal attendee here. They look so obedient, having everything down to each strand of their hair scripted to play for her, and they are making shows of how compliant they look. 

Needless to say, she is more bewilderedly amused than giddily enchanted by some son of the whatever house of studious scholars. How many books they have published be damned. Their philosophy is for dilettantes and not like the ones she argues back and forth in hard scribbles with Anton from wherever he is currently, or the ones that they speculate animatedly in a dignified manner during boring courts like this. 

Emily wants another glass of ginger ale. She is looking for the server with Corvo's raised eyebrow on her back and finally, the absence of Jameson's eyes when she comes across a lightly pinked Alexi tittering with two of the guards on duty tonight by a side entrance leading out to a secluded part of the gardens. 

Perhaps it does not help that the Crystal Ballroom is built in the center of the Dunwall Tower. So many exits and windows to be covered by guardsmen, especially in light of that one time she was poisoned in Tyvia. The servers here are trained to test the drinks she consumes in quick succession before she swipes them off their tray. Such a waste of training when she merely sticks to the server with the tray of ginger ale who really doesn't fail to pull out the spoon to stir and smell the glass he will hand her. Every. Single. Time. Just for her. As if his eyes aren't already constantly on his tray. 

So many lives on the line when Corvo could just allow mithridatism in her training. And _please_ , Tyvian poison isn't the only poison out there that can kill her. The odourless, colourless toxin that Anton makes as a byproduct of his elixirs are even undetectable apart from distillation. 

But Emily finds the server just as her eyes are captured by the way Alexi is smiling against the yellow light of the chandeliers and the shadows of the archway, and she sees the server from the corner of her eye as he conspicuously stirs a glass of ginger ale, takes a whiff, and touches his tongue to the spoon then wiping it with his apron before sliding it back into his pocket for disposal. 

Oh _damn it_ , she sees him alright and she walks briskly over to exchange her empty glass for the full one he offers in hand with thanks before approaching the trio by the door. 

The air is warmer as she gets closer to the outside. And with the way Alexi is looking so relaxed, it feels as if Emily has stepped out of a frozen bubble and into an affable atmosphere that is melting her from the outside the moment she passes the last of the pillars standing between them. 

Alexi catches her first. Her observant eyes never taking a night off even when she herself is given one. 

"Your majesty!" She exclaims brightly. The ginger-haired bows deeply with her arm crossed to her heart, as if she is still on duty as a Royal guard instead of a formally invited Royal First Captain of Dunwall. The other two guardsmen she was talking to are quick to cut their chatter upon her exclamation, turning around to do just the same in a much more hasty fashion. 

She hasn't even reached five strides into their space yet even. 

Emily smiles in exasperation at her friend, then to the two flush-faced men behind her. 

"At ease, guards," She addresses them as she walks close enough, then deciding to pull a mischievous flick on Alex's forehead as she rises with the men. 

The woman jumps up in surprise, clutching her head with a hand as the other is preoccupied with the sloshing champagne. "Lady Emily!" 

"It's supposed to be a half curtsy, First Captain." Emily corrects, nodding to Alexi's rare show of a slit dress instead of the usual pantsuit or romper, or even the gold lapels of her evening-dress uniform. 

Alexi smiles wryly as she rubs her forehead. "I felt like it would have been really indecent if I curtsied."

The guardsmen have the gall to flush redder as they turn back to standing straight by the door, looking out to the garden and away. 

Emily's lips play a smirk. "The dress seems like you're putting effort into vying for someone's attention. Inside?" 

She tilts her head towards the ballroom interior, where she knows many of Dunwall officers are mingling in veiled boredom. 

Then she tilts towards the opened door, overlooking the cordoned off garden that will lead to the outdoor party with some meandering. 

"Or outside?" 

The ginger-haired flushes even more atop the pink from her champagne, but maintains her composure after she calms from both the forehead flick and the teasing. 

"How about neither, Lady Emily? How does being forced to look pretty like the rest of the men in here battling for your hand with their eyes sound?" She retorts, taking a sip from her flute. 

(In hindsight, Emily should have picked that up as a clue, she thinks later on. But oh well.)

Ah. Madam Mayhew of the Draper's Ward. Having reached the peak of her social standing by becoming one of the most coveted dressmakers for the high-class socialites of Dunwall, she pushes her daughter to further her own class. While she herself is already an affluent figure of the Draper's Ward and is invited to some rather opulent high-class afternoon tea on occasion, Madam Mayhew perhaps thinks she can further her standing even more if a certain child of hers marries into an Aristocratic family. 

Maybe it does not help that her husband thinks the same, with being the Governor of the District apparently not enough. 

This enters their only daughter and child, Alexi _Davinia_ _Aldera_ Mayhew. Royal First Captain of Dunwall, much to their mortification but also reluctant pride considering her proximity to The Empress. 

Alexi is invited to many grand Royal gatherings and occasional imperial celebrations, given her high status that comes with being in charge of all of Dunwall Tower's security and second to only the Royal Protector under her job allocations. She is in the best position to covet some esteemed son of whomever Lordship, House of whatever Aristocratic name. 

_Prime position._ In fact. If it weren't for Emily being the subject of today and her coming of age for marriage, perhaps some of the men here would actually swoon over the First Captain in a gown. But no, their eyes are sadly, constantly trained on The Empress tonight. 

Though if she leaves for the outdoors now, she knows they won't follow. 

All of them just _can't_ bear to be in the presence of the lower class, with the ones that actually do probably already outside. And no one will be able to say that she isn't sufficiently protected outdoors without insulting the prowess of The First Captain who she would keep on her arm at all times, _and_ The Royal Protector who she knows is itching to get out of the stuffy room.

She would really be killing two birds with one stone. 

Emily gives Alexi a side glance. Steel green eyes meet her muted hazel.

"Would you like to take a breather outside?" 

::

They leave the outdoors two hours into the night. 

Her people are wonderful. Welcoming her, loving her. The warmth they exuded was far from the irritating heat of what they think is a cool evening, and even further than the apocalyptic frost in the Crystal Ballroom. It was homely and pleasantly accepting of her. 

She loved it.

She loved dancing with the crowds to the lively tunes, she loved the drunken singing of the men and women that had just a little too much alcohol. She enjoyed the geniality of how the children were not afraid to talk and babble in her ears even when their parents were feeling embarrassed over them. She laughed along when many of them regaled tales of unfortunate embarrassing incidents and when they decided to divulge in the secrets of the streets; the gossips. 

Many families left early in light of the mandatory school the next morning, leaving behind older citizens and middle-aged workers that do not require an early rise. The mood turns quieter then, as she had decided that she wanted to hear about the lives of the people around her. 

The first woman who shared had a missing arm. _Lost it to the rats_ , she said with a wave. The only thing that saved her from further rot was how affordable health elixirs became just in time. Not to mention, the subsidiaries and financial policies that were brokered those four years into the beginning of Emily's reign. She had a tough time in between, but it was made just a little better after then. 

The next person after her was a man who had lived in Rudshore before the dam broke. He confessed in all honesty that he had fled Dunwall for Karnaca during the time gangs had started taking over on top of the disaster that was Hiram Burrow's usurp. He didn't plan to come back if it weren't for how his wife had always wanted to visit the now flourishing city a year ago. It was the starting of the tyrannical reign of the new Duke of Karnaca that actually cemented his decision to move. 

Some people complained about the increasing prices of Whale oil and other products relating to the mammal. They know how scarce the catches are getting lately, but they can't seem to be able to find any better solutions to using the Whale oil since it is more than just a source of electricity to them. It is an ingredient for salves, remedies, drinks, and even for the hell of it, skincare products. As Whale Oil prices increase, so do these everyday products.

The rest talked about the changes to the city. For the better and the worse. The expansion of the Old Port District guaranteed increased trading and job openings, but for surrounding residents, they were an increased source of noise considering the ships that enter their strait. This topic riled those who actually lived and worked there. They _need_ the port, but it is so _noisy_ _can't they keep it down in the evenings?_

It was a little insight into their everyday lives. It gave her a sense of sonder, that just like herself, many of the people before her were facing troubles, have gone through tragedies, and are sometimes a little annoyed by just everyday things. 

But then, when she wanted feedback regarding the state of the city, how it was to their likings, and they were surprised that she had even bothered to ask. 

_"Why?"_ She had inquired, genuinely confused. 

_"Why, your majesty, we shouldn't be intruding upon your duties. Lord knows how busy you are!"_

A little hint of sarcasm, but also a little hint of saying how absurd she is, trying to see what more can be done when everything feels just the way it was before 1834, minus the whale scarcity of course. 

_"My duty is my people. Aren't all of you one of?"_

And that got through their skulls like a warmly heated arrow. Oh, some of them have doubts, clearly written on their faces about how she is just asking for the sake of asking to pretend like a caring ruler. But _please_. It took her six months to restore Rudshore District _and_ Draper's Ward to get them running again, not six years. She knows what is important to her people, alright? 

They had nothing much to ask for. To say even, other than the concerns of the noise from the industries and the Whale Oil prices. But they did bring up ideas for increased mobility through the city and more recreational sectors to liven the grey of Dunwall. 

Expansion of rail carriages, and perhaps the convenience of them. For one. Road expansions to allow more efficient mobile travel, that is two. More parks and lighter colours to brighten the city, that is three. 

Not surprisingly, Alexi had nodded to the first point. Travelling from Draper's Ward to Dunwall Tower is tiresome with the lack of her own carriage to ride. 

She dreads whenever she needs to go home for the weekends, and often doesn't even bother if she can get away with not going back to visit for the week. And today, it was really worse, coming from Draper's Ward in a _gown_. 

_Oh Lady Emily, would you please install more lines in the district? I feel absolutely_ awful _from just thinking about going home tonight in this dress!_

Ugh. She laughed with the people who did upon her exclamation. 

Though it probably speaks volumes about how Alexi decided to stay in the Tower for the weekend again because, in all honesty, she had visited for the week already to prepare for this celebration of The Empress's coming of age. 

Emily is now walking with the woman, quiet as the First Captain escorts her to her quarters. 

The lighting on the living floor of the Tower is dim, with just table lanterns and standing lamps being lit within rooms. She requested this setting to the servants, seeing as the only ones that are truly inhabiting the above floors are mainly just three people. And the occasional Jameson Curnow who actually has some other nicer apartment down on Kaldwin Boulevard than the one he is offered within the Tower. 

Alexi is still flushed from the flutes of champagne she downed during the night, and Emily is, well, still not quite believing the fact that she is two months sober.

They pass by the library room, where the light curls on Alexi's jaw as they walk by. Yellow shines the highlight of her cheeks and the bow of her lip, with the streaks of her ginger hair striking in gold. 

A lot of the men outside noticed the guard on her arm more than the Empress herself, when they first entered the gardens. It isn't very much hard to see why, she supposed. 

Alexi is dazzling tonight. All relaxed and a little softer than the days she has a duty, it puts off the harsher lines of her face. The curve of her cheeks and the pout of her lips are accentuated by light brushes of makeup and powder that her mother had no doubt forced upon her. It complements the fanciness of her royal blue gown, with the loose high neck and the eye-catching embroidery of pastel flowers decorating her dress top. 

"Catch the fancy of any man today?" She asks innocently, as she turns her focus to finally taking off her gloves. The warm evening allowed Emily to appreciate the small open back of this caped jumpsuit, but that is a different story when it came to the breathability of her fingers in the matching gloves. 

She doesn't know why she picked this outfit when she could have just turned up in her normal regal attire. She doesn't even know why she retired to her room to bother washing up for the party when she needs to do so again after it. 

The silence in the hallway stops her musing when Alexi doesn't make the disgusted but resigned groan she was expecting. 

Emily turns to the woman and is promptly stopped dead in her tracks by a pair of sharpened steel green eyes. 

Alexi's face is more opened and readable with how her hair is twisted away into a simple updo. It is how Emily sees the raw gloom darkening her face, how she sees an ache in her throat, and a weight sitting on her shoulders. 

The flush on her cheeks is a mockery of what thoughts she is harbouring in her head, and oh how Emily now realises that she has not even once looked at any person twice.

Any person but _her_. 

"Alexi." She tries. The fall in her tone startles her, but she hides it under the tensing space between them. 

"I wasn't catching the fancy of any man today I'm afraid, Empress." The ginger-haired admits with a mournful smile. 

And her mind _runs_. She wasn't trying to catch any sort of impressive son of an Aristocratic Lord. She wasn't trying to dazzle any man with the gown she wore or the bare shoulders she shows or the open slit of her mid-thigh she reveals. 

She wasn't even thinking of any man of a status suitable enough for her parents, nor how she is going to catch the attention of a high born soldier, or how she is holding her alcohol in front of potential suitors, or the way she is walking and talking and eating. 

Because she was trying to catch the attention of _The Empress._

And Emily was so heedless to this point that she overlooked every tiny thing that Alexi has done today. 

Appearing by the secluded exit to the outside with rosy cheeks and a warm smile, knowing what she would want to do during the stiffness of the festivities. Sticking to her arm, not for protection and security, but to make sure Emily is always held on hand with a piece of advice whenever she felt at a loss with her people. Smiling, constantly smiling this evening, to ensure a bubble of warm affability. Subtle touches for attention, to the sparkling grape juice offered to the children, to her favourite chocolate pastries, to the group of dancers by the musicians. 

The eyes, the stares, the _attention_. 

Everyone looked at Alexi, not because of the rarity of a First Captain out of formal uniform, but for the enchanting effect of _love_ on her person. It brightened her and everyone saw how she blossomed. Alexi Mayhew complimented The Empress and there was no other that could complete her as the monarch did. 

And Emily, unforgivingly, was oblivious to it. 

The air turns stiffer upon the realisation. 

Alexi takes a step forward into her space, and The young Empress doesn't move away. Almost like she allows her to do so in her silence. 

It merely feels so right and so fitting into place, the way the woman before her moves to compliment herself. Every step, she is there behind her and beside her. When she falters, this Officer is forever there to ensure her mistakes do not impact as she is brought back to her feet. 

It's so _natural_. 

For this to come to be. 

The Royal Officer who has always been by The Empress's side. Just like her father was to her mother. 

And when Alexi steps forward and slides into her space, invading her bubble by exuding a weighted air of _what-should-be_ , Emily feels as if there is nothing else to do but to stay in place and let her take the lead. 

Chest close to hers, flush with just a sliver of heated space between them. 

"I have only ever wanted you to look at me, Lady Emily." She breathes, a whisper under her breath, just loud enough for both of them to hear. 

She pushes closer, causing Emily to take a step back to balance the heaviness of the feverish closeness between them. Green flickers between her own mundane brown. A pale hand raising to hover over her shoulder. Half lidded eyes falling. Ginger eyelashes so lush. 

"Pardon me, my lady," warm breath with the hint of the red grapes from before, "but I really, have always wondered how your lips will taste."

Fingers daringly skim across her jaw, a lean forward to press her back, and back and back, just before Emily's elbows are forced against the wall, where another hand snakes around to cushion the bump. 

"I only ever vied for your attention, wishing for you to notice _me_."

The Empress can feel her breathing graze her neck as she leans her head back. 

Her mind is floating, weightless in the haze of a lazy fog. The way Alexi stares at her with a leaden gaze, weighted to pull her down and root her to the ground. 

When Emily looks down, she feels like she is in a daze. 

It is like a whirlpool, her eyes, causing The Empress to become caught up in the green swirl, whirling right into the vortex that threatens to envelop her entire being, devouring her entire body in a heat that is starting to set alight the nerves under her skin. 

Alexi's lips part and her pout entice her to touch, tempting her to wonder how she will feel under her fingers if she brushes by her neck, her collar, and spine. 

An internal exhale. A dry swallow. The words fall out of her mouth, and she sees how the woman's eyes trace up to her throat, and crawl down her jaw to her lips in a slow-moving fire. 

"Show me, then." Emily lets her chin fall. "What will you do for my attention?" 

Alexi doesn't hesitate. She has waited long, and she yearned for so much. 

She licks her lips and pulls herself closer so agonisingly slowly in hesitation that Emily can't help but to close her eyes and meet her in her path. 

It is a gradual heat. 

A curl slithering in her core, her nerves being set alight, her neck crawling on fire. The softness of Alexi's lips, causing her to wonder how hard she can push against the woman until her knees feel weak. 

Her hands rise to cup her cheeks and she wonders how long Alexi has had to wait for her to hold her like this. 

It is sweet, a light touch of hesitancy that falls into confidence. Then it is the pressing harder against each other, the slide of a tongue against her teeth. 

A quickening in their pace, to taste more of what she had only once wished, fantasised, and is now experiencing. 

Breathlessness catches her throat, but Emily cannot have enough of the wetness on her lips, the rush of her pulls, the knicks against her teeth. 

Hands roam, a snake into the skin of her back, a palm around hers. Fingers behind her neck, hands in her hair, trying to pull out the invisible holds in her bun. 

Alexi, Alexi, _Alexi_. 

When she pulls apart, she whimpers. When her lips nip at her jaw, she moans, and _Emily_ can't have enough of the sounds that mewls past her lips. It is like a hazy fog that she falls into, with a licking fire sliding up her chest like magma, her head lulls against the pinkish fervent heat that this woman has pulled her into. 

She wants to feel her collarbone, slide her hand down her spine, and drag her fingers across her chest. She wants to know what velvet this woman will feel like, she wants to know how she will sound and how she will flush against her if she presses her under. 

Emily tugs and flips them, caging Alexi to the wall with the force of her body and catching her by her lips again as she reaches for the annoying zipper holding up her gown. A hand pins an arm that tries to snake, against the wall above her head, and by _The Void_ , Alexi is mewing against her lips and it sends shivers to her core. 

They don't stop, she won't stop. But when the zipper is pulled down to her lower back, Alexi breaks and her lips speak, and Emily can only stare in a trance as they move. 

"Empress, Empress, Empress. My lady Emily, are you sure?" She breathes, so hypnotically. 

The Empress slides close, a knee between legs, a pinning hand, a palm against her cheek. Burning Hazel against darkened green. 

Emily has nothing else but to say, " _yes_."

::

When she comes to in the middle of the night, there is nothing but the silence of the dark and the occasional flash of a guardsman's torch from the roof. It is the mystifying hour of the night, when everything feels ethereal and otherworldly, where reality seems to be hanging in between The Void and the real world. 

Alexi is a heated furnace that is sleeping curled and soundly under the sheets beside her, and Emily appreciates the sight of the mess of ginger hair sprawled across the white pillow. 

But there is something about waking up after hours of endless fiery passion so rushed and hazy, that everything just feels grey afterwards and so bland. 

Without the vivid colours that pulled her into a fog, her body feels hollow. 

Her chest feels empty, a silent cavity in the midst of hearing the woman who sparked so many eclectic responses from within herself in such a short time, breathing by her neck, feeling her hand holding her shoulder as she sleeps so peacefully after a trailblazing night, oblivious to her partner. 

When Emily exhales, she wonders how there is still anything left in her that requires the need to breathe. 

When she draws the following breath, she fights the feeling of manually breathing to make sure her body remains alive. There is a nagging thought that speculates the possibility of suffocating herself by withholding the inane need to breathe, though she knows that it is quite impossible. She can only suppress reflexes for so long. 

She sighs inwardly, feeling her blood pool in her back and up in her head. 

She wonders what Corvo will make of Alexi's shoes left out in the corridor, where they had left them when it was a hassle to walk dizzily in. Or her gloves where she dropped them in favor of holding Alexi's hips. 

Perhaps he will approve, knowing that Alexi would be the only one that is suitable for her. She cares for her safety, and she is the only one other than her father that Emily will feel at ease with. Without considering the childish Jameson Curnow that she tolerates like a brother of course. 

When Emily exhales again, she feels a tension in her body, her bones being sprung but not released, her fingers twitching and her neck crawling with nerves. She is restless, hollow and vacant, waiting for the pulse of an energy to bring herself upright again.

The heat of Alexi's hand on her shoulder is a beat that makes her pause in deciding to get up. But her body is being wound up, with sleep evading her again after a long day. She is bone-weary, dread like a black sludge in her veins, but she is also awake and numb without a feeling.

Emily rises, slowly sliding the hand off her bare shoulder, letting a bare leg fall to the side of the bed, then coming to a stand in silence. 

The night is a little cooler than what it was in the evening. But while it is less stiff, it makes up for it with the silence. 

Everything is still without sound. No chatter from overhead guards, nor a rustle of trees beyond her windows. Not even the rush of a carriage nor the murmur of the skeleton crew of servants on the night shift. 

Dead, boning, and bare stillness, only broken when she moves to retrieve her night robe by her vanity.

She slides on the slippery charmeuse as she walks across her room to her adjoining bathroom, uncaring for the naked skin she bares to the crawling heat of the night when she does not bother to tie the robe. 

She is weightless and floating as she walks across polished stone, but it changes when she reaches the doorway. 

Her mind barely catches up with her movements, and it crashes into a splattering stop. 

She does not turn the light on when she enters. It will only burn her and maybe wake Alexi despite how far she is from the door. When Emily enters, she closes the door soundlessly without a click behind her. 

The sink is but a short walk across the cool marble tiles to the middle of the room, with the architectural layout by the Grand designers actually planned in an act of treachery against her. 

As she walks, her legs grow in leaden weight. A tank of whale oil strapped to each calf as she anticipates finally reaching the white glow of ceramic. The heaviness grows with each step, and she dreads the way her blood pools at her core, and how her bile is crawling up her stomach, and the way her heart feels so empty and yet it is pressing against her ribs, threatening to claw out of her chest. 

The robe slips from her shoulders. Warm air against her throat. 

She reaches cooling ceramic with a stuttering gasp and her hands brace against the sides as emptiness crawls up her throat and drowns her ears with a crashing roar. She arches when she exhales, agony shaking her and clawing up her insides, tumbling everything through a grinder. 

She meets sunken eyes from the lack of sleep and bony cheeks from nothing when she looks up into the mirror. There is a pale face curtained by dead hair, staring back. 

Her life is on track, her world is straight. Her Empire is flourishing, there are plans for city expansion being drawn out, her people love her, she has someone to love and she has just turned of age. 

And _yet_ , there is a void within herself that threatens to consume her from the inside out, making it known to her that it is always there and she is just one step from falling into its gaping abyss if she hasn't already. 

It is an ugliness that rears its head when it can't in her nightmares since she doesn't sleep often. It is a beast with claws that shreds all her life and passion and will to live. It is a monster with giant hands, able to strangle what semblance of control out of her and cause her to falter, blank and want to curl in her sheets and never wake up again. 

It is an invisible suffering, when she feels too much and none again, like a cycle that makes her fear being overwhelmed into a haze. Everything is _right_. Everything is _fine_. But this bundle of restless fire, twisting within, it begs to lash out, to set everything up into smoke and flames and dissonance. 

It claws her now, pulling her from the inside, roaring with white noise as it is emptying her body and filling it up. 

Filling it up with nothing. 

Emily screams with an open mouth with no sound, wanting desperately to burst the bubble filled with light and heavily weighted emptiness. 

Her body arches and she is all but bracing against the sink, fingers curling and pulling back skin. 

She wishes to scream, to shout, and yell and release the pressure that is suffocating her and she knows she cannot, for she is to suffer without an aid. 

Without anyone to know but her and The Void itself.

Her hand raises to thump the crashing waves within her chest. It does nothing to burst the bubble, and she merely resorts to clawing against her own throat, scratching down her clavicle. 

_Oh_ , sweet agony. 

This is what happens when she takes everything with force, what happens when she feels everything, and leaves behind nothing. The aftermaths make her wish she can die instead of being forced to still be breathing. 

Her hand tightens around her throat. She exhales with a wretched breath. 

The air chills around her. 

Even under the crashing waves emptying her of life, she still tastes the frigid hunger of The Void easily, much like the one in her chest. 

She freezes. 

She is pulling back a gaping hollow in the cavity of her lungs as she looks up to meet the eye of The Outsider right behind her in the mirror. 

She sees the blank face pulling on his skin, and she knows she is a messy sight to behold. Naked with nothing but a slippery night robe around her arms, mussed hair falling limply over her shoulders, sliding down her back in dishevelled tousles.

Emily turns the tap on, ready to bundle all the coiling nerves in her body, ready to stifle every wretched howl of agony threatening to rip past her teeth. 

She braces her hands, hunching her back to splash water and wake her face, so she can knock herself out of the melancholic hysteria that is clawing for her and—

—and The Outsider turns the tap off. 

Her legs crumble under her weight and she is caught by a cold embrace as they sink to the marble floor. 

A turbulent, roaring maelstrom swirls with renewed vigor in her bones, and she is pawing at her face with a single hand as an icy clamp covers her mouth and pulls her other away despite her struggles, because _by The Void_ , the pain is so great in her chest that she wishes for a knife to wrench her heart out for any searing pain would be better than the howling ache arching her back. 

She wails in the hazy mix of pained mania and a panting madness for air. A cavity in her heart. She is pressed hard against the block of ice that is The Outsider's chest and she doesn't care for the hand that hides her howls, she just wants to claw her brain out and let it die in her hands. She just wants this to _stop_. 

What is this living if every breath she takes is just a hairbreadth away from dying gruesomely in her own bathroom, by her own undoing?

The crashing waves of pulsing terror and fear roll over her body. Just as quickly as it came to seize her in its Jaws and spin her in its vortex, the tornado finally has nothing else to destroy and lay waste to in its path. 

Her throat has more than just choked and suffocated her, and she is nothing but a husk with a simmering monster crawling back under her organs to wait for the next time she falters. The mania in her chest sinks low, decidedly filling up with emptiness and a hollow ache. 

A pit falls in her stomach. A barrel of Whale Oil weighing her down to the ground. 

Emily curls, pulling in her bare knees and a hand covering her eyes as she sobs with no tears. She is left with nothing but shuddering breaths and an empty chest that rattles as she heaves and hiccups in. 

The Outsider releases her mouth and lets her hand fall around her legs to hug herself tighter. He remains kneeling, a knee on the floor and a thigh caging her side like he has been doing since she fell against him. 

A show of weakness. 

Nothing he hasn't seen before. He has caught her plenty of times in this state of despair, just watching her tilt and tilt into an inky pit of swirling nothingness, unmoving until he has to catch her when she is nothing but about to fall in. 

Emily falls back, exhausted, and spent. She tilts her forehead and leans against the bony collar that doesn't move. Her ears press against a chest that doesn't beat and her back feels the curving stone of a lean thigh. 

Her mind is blank. An absent abyss in light of the scraping wound in her brain. 

She feels everything and nothing. Sprung up and left in a cesspool of cold air and warm breaths. 

_This is how her life will go on._ She thinks. This is how her life always goes on. 

She will stand and wash up as if nothing had happened to her. She will leave and she will work until the crack of dawn and watch Alexi rise from her bed. Then she will continue working, and working, and working. She will go to court for parliament. 

She will write letters, set aside proposals, discuss the possibility of a new bill, draw plans to expand her city, and assign tasks. The day will carry on, she will tell Alexi that she cannot, and it will fall into the next day where she will repeat everything without Alexi, without this hysteria, just like the next and the every other. 

Until the day comes to hit her right in the gaping hole of her ribs, and she will tumble down like this again. 

But until then, that is how her life will continue. 

She closes her eyes for a while. Feeling her nakedness rub against her thighs, and her head being cradled by the crook of a cold neck. 

It takes a moment to speak. And when he does, he is pulling up the open robe back over her shoulder. Nonchalantly like nothing had just happened. Like she hasn't cried for the umpteenth time in his presence. 

"There is always a short interlude just before a tragedy, much like the silence before a scream. What happens when you falter in the stillness?" He does not pull his hand away from her, merely laying on her collar, a comforting chill against her skin. "What happens when there is nothing to hold as you fall?" 

He lays his cheek on her head, and she sighs at the gentleness he gives her in this moment of weakness. 

Emily is twenty-one years old. 

It is the third day of the Month of Rain. Her mother has been dead for eleven years and four months, and she feels as if she has just died and awoken in her grave beside her. 

* * *

**_"_ **

_"Wyman." Corvo hisses, snarling as if the name did him so much wrong. In a sense, it did. He was always lamenting the unknown individual leaving behind unsolicited notes for his daughter, notes growing more flirtatious the more he came across them._

_It was amusing, really. But he won't say that he didn't mean any of his inked words._

_Not especially now. The raw wound, still bleeding red, tainted black. Carved in both of them._

_The old friend doesn't lunge for his collar like he expected him to. He leans back against the ship rail instead, looking decades older as his head falls into his hands._

_"Do you know that she's dead?" The old father asks gravely. Billie looks away. Knowing things she shouldn't say. She is thinking of an echo of a tethered soul, glowing orange._

_He does. He hates knowing. He hates mourning._

_It is a bitter wound, a knife constantly curling in his chest as if the slit on his neck isn't good enough._

_"I wish I don't." He replies, wondering if this emptiness was like the abyss she had always felt. Should he have held her more when she was dying on the inside through the years?_

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a note left from the first chapter. I have no idea how to remove it. My brain is honestly a little dead. 
> 
> Did I post this during lesson? No one can prove that.
> 
> If anyone thinks the chemistry between Alexi and Emily is a little too sudden, well, it is.


	4. Time goes on, she doesn't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Events of Dishonored 2. Emily is a little different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made unbeta'd into a tag.  
> It's a long chapter cut into 2 but I really just want to group it together since they're all relating topics. I mean, I _am_ a long-winded person.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored.

* * *

**"**

_She knows what he is asking, even without the chill from an open mouth. They are like that. A pair without the need for words, because she has been privy to his mind enough. A familiarity so intimate, and so bizarre to be associated with The Outsider._

_But she doesn't care for that now. Not now._

_Not when Alexi is crawling all over her skin, fluttering touches against her body, baring her naked so intimately even with her entire court regalia still intact. Not when Alexi is whispering in her ears, calling her name, echoing warm breaths down the curve of her back._

_Not when Alexi is holding her so tight, panting, writhing, stealing her away, making her wish she had never let her go after that night._

_Emily casts an equally chilled gaze on pale skin, crawling with tendrils of smoke._

_A murmur against cold velvet._

_The Outsider hums, unperturbed, and unsurprised by her reply, then he drags his finger from her lips across her cheek, a trail of ice blazing to her ear. He slides close. A perfect fit._

_"No turning back, Empress."_

_Velvet, ice on her neck._

**"**

**_Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be._ **

* * *

Grief burns her soul from within. 

When she enters the cabin, she is met with a metal room. A cot to the right, under a sealed window, with a heater sitting at the end of the bed. On her left is a working table with an assorted mess she doesn't catalogue in her mind. The back of the room has crates and boxes lining the far wall as pipes line the ceiling and the crown of the floor. 

It is a simple, spartan room. Sufficient for her minimal needs of rest and work. Sufficient for all she will ever need, really. 

Meagan has given her a roof over her head, a shelter to keep her warm on the seas, to enable her on this journey she has yet to think about going on even though the ship is starting to sail over to Karnaca. She should be relieved, that a plan has been laid out for her to follow in light of the chaos of the usurp. But the writhing heartache within her plans to sink her in a sea of sorrow instead. 

The Empress brings herself to step into the grey room. Pushing and pushing the turbulent storm just waiting in her chest further down until she has closed the door. She feels her energy pull back from her limbs, just seeping into the growing pressure in her core. 

She moves into the room. She does not close the door just yet. 

Emily unbuckles her father's sword from her belt, feeling the fold of the metals and the gears of the weapon under her palm. Blood sticking to the edges of the slick blade, setting maroon where it did not drip off in time even during her vigorous movements before it dried. She lays the sword on the sturdy steel of the desk, metal clinking on metal with an echo. 

She moves to unhook her father's heavy mask next from where it was slot against her hip. 

Emily closes her eyes against the howling wind tearing in her chest upon finally setting her eyes on the intricately woven metal sinews of the mask as she places it on the table. 

Blood is also maroon against copper-tinged ochre. It reminds her of the red dripping off mussed ginger hair. 

She braces herself on the edge of the desk, pulling, reeling in the bursting mania crushing her throat. Swallowing, clenching her teeth, trying to wire her jaw shut even as the wind howls in her ears, screaming and screaming and ringing. 

Blood boils in a feverish heat. In a swift motion, she shuts the door with a click and collapses with her back against the metal, legs giving out at the weight of the opening chasm in her chest. 

Grief pours in the absence of a ginger-haired woman, just the same as when her life had bled out in rivets of red. 

Beautiful green eyes Fading. Eyes like gems glittering under the yellow of a chandelier. Eyes reflecting the flicker of candlelight. Adoration sitting just behind them, hiding the sharpness of an Eagle. 

Steel shoulders standing against bright sun. A steady hand at the door of a carriage. A bubbly presence, forever loyal on her left, marked in silence only by the clattering of a longsword at every pause. Always, always there just a step behind herself, a constant in her life. Should have been a constant in her life. 

Floating and floating in her embrace. A comfort that warms her icy bones like a fire hearth. 

Blood stark red on pale skin, only an echo when she turns. 

Blinding smiles, cherubic laughter, excited sentences spoken so fast that they become a single word. _Lady Emily_ ringing in her ears, a whisper trailing on her skin, a breathless sigh against her clavicle, inciting a torrent of turbulent waves whirling in her core. 

Her body trembles as she bursts. 

Her hands instinctively fly to cover her eyes as her tears spill like from an opened tap, unable to be held back any longer behind a cracked dam. Her palm tightens around her mouth, stopping her sobs from being audible, muffling the heaving breaths and the scream threatening to tear out from her throat.

Grief is a tsunami. 

Devastating in anticipation, a torrential mania spurring from awaiting the impending gloom. Grief crashes the strongest of mind fortresses like they were made of paper towers instead of fifteen years of a meticulously constructed mental fortitude against any defeats and failures that would have otherwise been catastrophic to both her willpower and her motivation. 

It makes people wish they had died from the cause of it. Grief makes people want to dig six feet through the ground and lie in the hole they've made themselves. 

It is an impregnable force. Unrelentless, unstoppable, and illuminating. 

Emily cries her heart out. A leviathan sitting on her chest and forcing her back, flat against the corner where the door and the wall meet in a manner to make her so small from the roaring waves. Her hands trust her mouth to not howl her sorrows, choosing to scratch at her throat, her jaw, her cheek, instead. 

Because grief makes her feel Alexi everywhere. 

On her skin, breathing over her collar, fingers fluttering along the side of her face. Telling her. Telling her. Telling her about her absence. That hollow ache in her chest, filling up with an alluvial wave flooding the cavity. 

When she was near and alive, she had never missed her so much that it burns to even think. 

And here, here with the knowledge that she won't ever look into sharp green eyes again, that there will be no reassuring acknowledgement of her safety, her presence, it makes her regret how she knows the taste of her lips. 

Because she can't stop feeling her now. Knowing that she won't ever again. 

Soft breath echoing up her neck. Slithering finger trailing down her shoulder. Velvet lips brushing over her clavicle. 

Every breath is a heavier weight on her chest. 

Grief is wishing she is dead instead of the one who has died and knowing that they will feel the same if it was the other way around. Grief is a choking hazard, able to kill if not removed. 

Emily clenches her teeth, feeling Alexi crawl around her as she trembles in the dark.

* * *

**_"_ **

_"What is it to you that I nearly died? What irks you so much, Outsider, about me nearly bleeding out to my death?!" She spits, reeling around with a snarl. "My wellbeing has never been your concern. Haven't I lost your interest when I cursed your purpo—_

_"Its because I lied!" He shouts, taking an angry step forward, stunning her mind into a pause. His voice echoes in the study._

_In her confusion, as she pulls back, he speaks._

_"It was never about you being insolent." He hisses, crossing the room in a stride and jabs the air with a finger into his point. Emotion,_ bleeding, _he can't control them. He doesn't know how to_ _. "It was never about what misplaced judgement you had or wha—what accusations you forced upon me. What irritated me was_ never _what you said that day."_

_He is in front of her. Just the length of a desk away. She looks up at him, lips curled. Her wound is bleeding again and she. Doesn't. Care._

_"Then what? Was it a timely realisation of how much time you wasted with a mortal? Was it a realisation that you preferred De—_

_"It was because you made me feel! " He exclaims through clenched teeth, cutting like a butcher's knife swinging into her words, silencing her._

_Emotion. A strange anomaly for both of them. One too broken. One too incognizant._

**_"_ **

**_Excerpts from a long time later. Long time never._ **

* * *

Emily turns to the doors leading out of the street, having concluded her mission. She has prevented Lord Aramis Stilton from falling into the hands of insanity, allowing him to retain his state of mind in this future that she has changed. 

For a brief moment, she wonders if insanity was guaranteed for casting a gaze into the secrets of The Void, why the rest of the ritualists such as Kirin Jindosh and Lord Luka Abele did not conform to the same consequential ending. 

Grim Alex was already in a deranged state of mind, hence insanity shall not claim her. Perhaps being such a fantastical inventor had a diminutive of craziness that comes with their creativity as well. And maybe Luka Abele and his egomania being the creme de la creme of society made him too, an unsuitable candidate for insanity. 

And Emily wonders for the briefest moment, that perhaps she was a little insane as well, seeing how she seems normal after constantly visiting and being visited by the depths of The Void. 

The Empress reaches for the door handle, determined to get back on The Dreadful Wale for a good night's rest for the next day. 

A split-second terror explodes from within her as a familiar bitterness announces the cold of The Void run up the axons along her spine. 

She is unable to even think of swiping a sword behind her when her legs are suddenly pulled from under her. Emily has not even fallen to the floor with a resounding thud before she is yanked by her legs by an unseen force of The Void in an unbreakable hold. 

She is being seized from behind, and she scrambles against the drag with her nails scratching against the ground for resistance. 

There is nothing she can reach. She cannot pull out her sword in time. 

The chill of entering The Void has not reached the nerves in her spine when the force throws her into the air, spinning and launching her into a freefall with silver nothings to grab hold for a second before she sees land on a far grey rock at a speed too fast for her to comprehend as the force resumes its haul of her body. 

She is going to slide off the island instead of landing on it, at the rate she is going. She finds no purchase to grab onto within her sight and Emily could only look straight as she falls headfirst past the edge without brushing it at all, looking at the familiar bottomless pit that she had willingly launched herself into when she was younger.

A cold hand grabs onto her wrist. 

Whiplash knocks her breathless as her fall is stopped by The Outsider standing over the edge in all his infernal glory, and her the hanging doll with her hair unravelling out of her twisted bun. He has grabbed onto her, just before her untimely demise, again. 

She wonders what this spoke about their relationship. And about her sense of preservation as she finds herself hanging over the edge. _Again_. 

The entity pulls her back from the edge and to her feet before him, though they are weak from the adrenaline and the fright that is now settling into her bones and her muscles. Her hair falls over her shoulders and shields her face as she bends to grasp her knee, panting as the influx of air that inflates her lungs comes with the sudden ability to breathe. 

"Have you not learnt your lesson still, my dear Empress?" He wonders. 

She cannot answer him with proper words as her mind is _roaring_. 

The air allows her to think, to contemplate what in The Void she was just put through, and with the name of _Delilah_ and the feeling of The Void still on her ankles, she comes to an improbable conclusion. Impossible. And yet, still true.

Delilah had summoned Emily into The Void once. She had appeared in swirling smoke, ash, and amber. She had gone in the same fashion. The witch showed her memories. The witch manipulated the stones of The Void. She manipulated the very matter of all-encompassing darkness without a medium. Just a thought without a wave of a hand, and trees and towers materialise from and melt into ashen stone. 

Delilah tasted like the numbing cold of The Void. A swirling force of dark energy that chilled her nerves as much as The Void does itself. Back on the plane of life, she was like any other witch, though she felt more devastatingly powerful. But in the Void, she felt more of The Void's emptiness and energy than human. It felt wrong. It is a chill that crawls up her skin, unlike the cold The Void exhumes. 

And the _lust_ that Delilah exudes, the energy that pulls and charms and entices and fascinates men and women alike. The line between desire and hunger. 

Kirin Jindosh aspired to be the greatest inventor. He wanted to be better than the likes of Anton Sokolov and the nobody Piero. Delilah turned him into a child who wanted to constantly prove that he is greater. Delilah made him want more. Delilah made him want to be able to achieve greatness beyond the plane of life. She made him build machines that grant magic. 

Luca Abele had a self-righteous sense of his life put above others. He was made to feel superior after learning the toil his father went through. He was made to trump others under his foot. Delilah spurred him. The despotic Duke of Serkonos was not enough. Delilah made him the despot that helped revolutionise this age and time of rule. Delilah deluded him to think that he will never have to work for the goal of others after he brought her back from the Void. 

And _Breanna Ashworth_. A prospective woman that had her life structured before she was even born into her loveless family. 

Breanna Ashworth was a wild Eagle filled with wanderlust, locked in a cage of arrangements and duties. She aspired. She strived. And she was still locked down against her will. Delilah _inspired_ her. Delilah showed her freedom. Delilah forced her to see through a locked window that overlooked the outside world. Delilah told her that she could do whatever she wanted. Delilah made her _lust_. 

Breanna Ashworth was a woman Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin would have _become_. The ecstasy that stems from escape. The caged Eagle finally being freed. It would be so _easy_ to fall into a pit of never-ending hunger. Conformed to prideless duties, the eternal draft to serve her citizens, her people, when they think they serve her. When they think she _owes_ them. It would have been such a dismal float into such a wrongful disillusionment. 

To naturally plummet into totalitarian selfishness, because Emily had always wished for freedom and control to come in hand. 

Delilah would have made her want freedom and control to come in whatever hand. Be it immoral or dishonorable. Delilah would have made her lust, like how she did to Breanna Ashworth. 

And if Delilah was able to utilise her cunning and willpower into a might that forced The Void to her desires, then she is to ascend her humanity. She would become a shell merely harbouring the ravenous might that is the all-consuming Void. 

She would be The Outsider. A _god_. 

All for her power lust. 

And that made Emily furious. 

Because the opportune would have only come if a certain entity had graced her with his attention. If a certain entity allowed that witch to have a taste of power. A certain entity with the ability to harness the power of The Void to glimpse _into the future_. 

After all the troubles, misfortune, and _deaths_ that spanned her entire twenty-five years of life. All of them resulted from the meddlesomeness that is The Outsider. The magic, the interference, the opportunities. Bestowed, gleefully and eagerly by an entity, so enthusiastic with his next form of _entertainment_. 

And _oh_ , oh how she thought she was _special_. 

These revelations, Emily has in the span of _seconds_ as she regains her breathing. Her breaths, they do not come any quicker with the machinations of her mind in overdrive. 

She does not answer The Outsider and his quips. 

She _does not_ care that she is within the kissable distance to the mouth of the entity that she had fantasised so much about. She pushes Emily Kaldwin to the back of her mind, and she pulls Empress Kaldwin to the forefront and she demands, like the Empress she is. 

Because she needs her answers. 

Because three years ago, she fainted in court for the first time and he was by her bedside not because he wanted to check up on her health like an old friend, not because he wanted to conform to whatever category of personal relation she had placed him into nor because she was interesting enough to warrant a meaningless visit after an unanticipated incident. Unanticipated to mortals only, of course. 

But because she fainted three years ago, feeling the shadows warp and the vines crawl upon Delilah's burst into reality, Void-touched and powerful, and he was there to cryptically warn her but not reply to any following question afterwards. 

She needs answers. And just like when she was ten years old and feeling the world pointing swords at her, she will not stop until she gets to know _why_ Delilah _is_. 

Around them, the sacrificial transfiguration altar stands. The cold slab of stone, cracked but still standing. The ritualist reaper who still holds the stone rendering of the blades that took The Outsider's life, still standing frozen at the head of the slab. Still the same after nine years. 

Around them, stone spears the height of The Void, swirling and jagged edges poised to pierce the uncareful. Delusioned worshippers of The Void, they still stand in a ceremony at the feet of the stone slab. 

Around them, the air is still. Black smoke shrouds the island, steel grey unperturbed by any action that happens on the land. 

She stares into pitless eyes, black and swirling with ashen ink, filled with the absence of stars, begging to be satiated from the hunger that is its emptiness. It reflects the world that he overlooks, the world that is ever-changing, never-ending, always consuming. 

Emily raises her chin and sees how the micro-expressions that play on his face morphs from the tinge of amusement to a blank slate upon her change into a formal demeanor. 

She lets go of her hand that held onto his, tucks her fallen tresses behind her ears, and takes a step back to regard the god before her coolly. 

"Empress, to what do I owe this honor?" like warm oil slithering on cold marble, his tone is touched with the falsity of humor. He looks at her, interestingly. 

Emily waves the question away with a hand. 

"Four thousand years, Outsider, and no one has ever thought to use your mark against you?" She inquires. "It is not hard to stumble upon this altar. It is far easier than to comb the world for the twin-bladed knife that took your name, no?" 

His gaze sharpens. He crosses his hands over his chest, she sees him wonder why she asked what she asked. 

"Indeed, Empress. The knife is an artifact that goes where it is needed, unlike this altar, forever a point anchored around The Void." The Outsider states. His lips pull for a fraction and his arms unravel to lace behind his back, before disappearing in his usual fashion. She waits. The black smoke and ash have not twisted into The Void before he reappears again by her side, looking down upon her with his hands now clasped behind his back. 

"Delilah was given your mark, Outsider. And she was cast off into The Void somehow. She found this altar without your guidance, _somehow_ , and harnessed the power of this site." Emily says, turning to him. "She became a part of The Void, didn't she? A part of you. How does it feel?" 

The Outsider sneers with the twitch of his lips. The disdain on his face as clear as the sun would be in The Void. But it merely curls for that second before he pulls back into a blank. 

"And what is your play, Empress? To rub salt in a wound that stings, when you clearly know how I feel about Delilah Copperspoon and her abuse of power for lowly ambition."

"You gave her a connection to The Void, Outsider. And seeing her intelligence, you gave her the tool she needed to become the being she is today." Emily accuses. "Did she interest you so much that you sort to ignore the future that The Void showed? Not the chaos she would wreck on the real world, Outsider, but on _you_ , on The Void. Dislike her as much as you may, but it is your mark that she bore when she transfigured the power here." 

She sees the moment The Outsider reels back. Not in shock, no, but in _insult_. Her words _land_ on the entity. And she sees it in how he straightens. 

The Outsider's eyes seem to deepen in its endless depth, in light of the accusations that The Empress throws at him. But it is not the accusations that cause him to narrow his eyes at her. It is the _intent_ , the poison laden in between the spaces of her words. She sees the moment The Outsider reels back, and it is when she chose to push her insolence. 

"Choose your next words wisely, Empress, or would you be so foolish to accuse me of causing human greed?" He advises. 

Insolence, it may be, but it is his power that granted so much suffering. To others, and to _herself_. 

"Her actions, they are. But her powers come from you. Her opportunity came from you. Most of the world's tribulations were with your intervention!" Emily continues righteously, turning to face him. She watches The Outsider retreat behind walls with every word. 

"Humankind is not blameless with their predisposition over materialistic desires such as the need to have power, but the fault in which devastation has been wrought on the real world is because they were also granted the ability to fuel their wanton needs when they did not have them."

He sees where she is going. He sees the blood spilled across marble, stark against white. He sees the blade futilely cutting through bursts of black smoke, blue crystal, and white ash. 

He sees six roof-walkers, a sword through an Empress, a city thrown into chaos. A woman plagued by grief. She _knows_ he does. 

And still, he does not hesitate to rebuke her after she has said her piece. 

" _Dearest_ Emily Kaldwin. I'm afraid your frustrations and pain are _misplaced_." He sneers, leaning forward into her space before disappearing. His voice continues to echo. "The fault for the destruction resultant from human greed _is_ human greed. I merely reward power when it is due. It is the person that wields the power that makes the decision, Emily Kaldwin, _not the power._ You blame the sword instead of the intention, and here I thought you knew _better_." 

He appears behind at the last word, by the skin of her back. She does not flinch. 

"You blame the sword that killed your Mother rather than the person. You forget that even without my intervention, Daud would have still killed your Mother with his skills, and Delilah Copperspoon would still have been cast into The Void to come across this altar, and even without that, her genius would still have taken your throne as well. You blame _me_ , when treachery runs in _your_ blood." 

He vanishes again, to appear in front of her, in her space, with a closeness that allows their breaths to mingle. The howl of The Void blows her unbound hair into both their faces.

"You blame the God of The Void for the actions of Humans, mortal. Do not think that just because you are The Empress of an Empire, the world will heed to your righteousness. Monarchs change. Empires _burn_. I have seen the world destroy and rebuild itself again and _again_." His eyes narrow at her, and he gives her nothing more than the disdain sewn into his face.

"Do not think that you are the first to think yourself right to accuse me, because within four thousand years, Emily Kaldwin, _you are not_."

She still stares defiantly into his abyssal eyes. Her chin is still raised. 

She's not wrong. It is still the help of a given power, still the interruption of a foreign entity capable of granting such power, that causes the supernatural fall of Mankind. Would The Abbey be created if The Void never made itself known? Would countless children be killed and slaughtered just because people believed in the alignment of stars challenging the might of The Void? 

Would witches be able to draw power still, if The Void culled its connection to Mortal planes? 

She recognises that it is the choice of a person in the way they use their gifts, she sees that neither The Outsider nor The Void influences each of The Marked or the Void-touched. But would The Outsider really give power to someone who won't use them in beautiful chaos and tide-changing decisions? A being predisposed to whatever intrigues and entertains his long existence? 

The fault still lies _there_. There in his existence. There in his mingling hands and interloping presence. She did not mind his trailing company in the shadows through her years, though not because of the agreement she made when she was ten and young. But just so it is, he has had been in the crevices of _all_ of mankind's history. 

Is recognition a requisite for godhood? Was he made to play with Mortals? 

Emily does not know. Emily sees that he is the root of power, and that power allowed people to achieve what they couldn't, and as an _Empress_ , she will cull problems in the way they will not become an issue again. 

So she still challenges him. She is still writhing with the sword twisting sorrow in her heart in renewed vigour. She hears his words. She sees him speak. She eyes him, still defiant. 

The Outsider regards her with disinterest. His face is a new slate. He looks down at her with his swirling black eyes and raised chin. And he reaches to the heart tucked into her waist pouch. 

"Do not also think, that just because you have known me for those meagre twenty years of your life, you may be able to influence your humane thinking onto me." He says. She could only watch as he holds her mother's heart in his hand beside their heads, and crushes it into smoke and ash. Her mother's voice _screams_ into nothingness. In her absence, a sinking hole in her chest, reopening. 

It is like a physical punch to the gut that she does not show, merely staring blood into the atrament of his eyes. 

"You are mortal, Emily Kaldwin. You are not the first to have held my interest for the time you think is long, and here we see why you have declined my power during this intermediate world-saving trip of yours."

He takes the timepiece, clasped onto her waist belt, and does the same. Black smoke and white ash bursts into nothingness. 

She knows what he is about to do, and for the first time since Empress Kaldwin has stilled her heart, Emily Kaldwin's perverse emotions deflate. There is nothing in her mind but numbing anticipation. She is lightweight. Floating. 

She has insulted him. Pinned a blame wrongly, but not unwarranted. He did give another choice. Another way for men to achieve what they desired when they had nothing but their desperation and their future which interested him. 

Her gaze falls to the sliver of cold white skin of his neck, exposed where his collar does not cover. 

She looks into his soulless eyes as he speaks again, her emotions strangely muted. "You think the interventions of The Void vexes you, then there shall be none of those in your life ever again." He brings a hand to her collar, and she feels the chill of his hand and his rings atop her layers. "Whether you fail or defeat Delilah Copperspoon is not my concern, girl, for your allure has run out long ago. Goodbye."

She feels warmth, when she leans forward to brush a daring kiss by his neck, as he pushes her through the blinding white vortex that is the portal back to the mortal plane. 

She stumbles onto tiled marble, artfully painted, just before the double doors that lead out onto the Dust District, where she was pulled into The Void by Delilah before. 

Emily knows that her connection to The Void has been severed. The warmth that fills her bones, and the way she feels so out of place in this world, it tells her so. 

But she carries on. Like nothing had happened. As if the entity who had been in her life for the past fifteen years did not sever his interest in her. As if he was actually never there at all, in fact. Numbness fills her bones. Swirling within.

She snips a length of the roll of bandages in a pouch for a makeshift ribbon to pull her hair into a bun, making sure her hair is out of her face, then opens the doors to make her way back to the Dreadful Wale. 

She has a Duke to meet. 

Along the way, she finds out the hardest that there is no magic in her bones either, no bonecharm to jump higher, or protection to bleed slower and hurt less. 

And somehow, that hurt even more than the quash of their connection. 

* * *

Emily wakes up to the night sky from within a cage. 

It is more of a prison cell than a cage, thankfully. She is surrounded by four stone walls and a small barred window. She sits up on the wall opposite the one with the window, and she sees the moon peeking in from the top edge. 

It is near dark in the cell, though her eyes are quick to adjust. She knows there is nothing with her but herself. There is no rancid stench permeating within the walls. There is no taste of dryness that comes with the climate of Dunwall. 

When she sits motionless and stills her breathing, she hears nothing but her own heartbeat. When she looks down at herself, she is wearing white coded layers of a lapelled coat fastened at her neck with a lace cravat, a frilled blouse over her cropped pants, calf stockings, and coffee-coloured shoes. Though it is much too warm and stifling for the white coat, hence she takes it off at the next moment. 

She cannot remember how she got here. When she tries, there is a migraine that rears its head near her temples. She stops trying after a while to rest her strained head. 

The cell door is on the left wall, on the right of the window opposite her. She tries the door first, despite knowing that her actions will be in vain for some reason. Cell doors are never left unlocked. There is a slot at the bottom where she supposes her food will come through, though she cannot open that as well. 

She eyes the high window next. With its bars thick and steady, she will never be able to pull them away to slip out. The best she can do would be to find out clues of where she is and wait out the next few days to observe guard rotations to escape. Or wait for Corvo and the crown guards like before. 

Emily clambers onto the bars successfully with several jumps to even reach. She pulls herself up to see through the gaps between the bars.

Her cell overlooks a dark courtyard, though it must look beautiful in the morning that will come. The garden does not seem like a prison courtyard, with marble stone enclosing the entire garden like a terrace. A stone gazebo sits on the furthest left corner, surrounded by bushes of flowers too dark to recognise. Stairs curl upwards to this level on the right, the furthest she could see. 

She looks upwards and realises the moon that peeked into the window was not a moon, but a garden night light. When she looks out further to find the fixture itself, she realises that she can see nothing beyond the expanse of the courtyard. As if neither the sky nor its stars and the moon existed, merely a rich expanse of dark grey nothing. 

This place is perhaps getting a little more unorthodox than she is used to. 

As she is about to drop from the window, a movement in the Gazebo catches her eye. There is someone in it. 

There is a woman, dressed darkly from head to toe. Emily can only make out details of the white of her sleeves and her collar as she walks backwards slowly, with her back facing her. Emily eyes the hair of the woman, following the way the hair is curled into a twisted and tucked bun. 

The same way her mother always wears her hair. 

The woman is backing out of the gazebo, facing something within it that is obscured by the roof and the angle Emily is studying at from her cell. 

A hand suddenly appears from the shadows, and— _What in The Void_ —Emily can only observe as a gleaming sword is plunged into the woman from her front.

"No!" She exclaims, watching the blade slide so smoothly, unhindered, into flesh. She groans as she pulls at the bars uselessly. "No!" 

Emily keeps her eyes on the woman, unwilling to let her go after watching such a violent act. 

She is ready to shout at the attacker, with adrenaline rushing in the blood of her ears, when she watches the head of the woman turn, still impaled. 

The head turns. And turns. And turns. And a horrible string of bone-cracking sounds follows at each angle turned. 

Emily whimpers in horror as the woman's head turns to the back of her body preternaturally, revealing the face of her mother. 

Her sunken eyes stare right into her own as recognisable as day. A dead gaze, pinning her soul in its place. She has a pale sickly pallor with a tinge of the yellow of the night light against her face, with it highlighting the unnatural turn of her neck. Her mouth then slowly opens, slacking and unhinging widely. 

She opens her mouth grotesquely, revealing nothing but blackness inside. 

An inky black hand erupts from her mouth, clawing its way out by grabbing purchase on her face. It is at that, that Emily screams and lets go of the window bars completely. 

She falls to the cell floor at a shorter height than she anticipates, but wastes no time clambering to her feet for the cell door.

A yell for help barely escapes her as she is suddenly swept off her feet from behind her, with twin holds yanking her by her ankles. 

She slams onto the floor with her breath knocked out of her lungs, and does not have nearly enough to scream as she is pulled backwards into all-consuming darkness. 

She is released from the hold and she finds herself free-falling in the dark, with the heart pumping anticipation of the ground drowning in her ears, blackness in her vision. 

Nothing is going to save her. She feels that rather than knowing. The wind winds hurriedly through her hair, and she is anything but. 

Emily can feel the maelstrom of mania blowing into life within her, sinking her bones and pressing on her heart. A fiery swirl of magma spins into existence in her chest, and oh, this heat takes her breath away and brings tears to her eyes. 

As a scorching heat suddenly erupts underneath her skin, scorching her from within, consuming the oxygen she needs to live, Emily knows she is alone. 

There is no mother. 

There is no father. 

There is no Alexi. 

There is no Outsider. 

No one is going to help her as she burns with an intensity that makes her wish she was dead. No one is going to help her as she falls to her death, her hair tossed over her head and her hands flailing for a hold. 

Her blood is _boiling, evaporating from her skin_. She screams. And she continues to scream. The wish for the pain to be satiated. The core of the fire burning with an oil fuel, unrelenting, constantly blazing. 

She can only scream even after her throat is dry and she tastes the blood in her throat, vaporising as she continues to burn. 

She feels the ground coming closer. She feels the heat burn within her reaching an apex. She can die soon and all she needs is the ground to come sooner, and then she can escape this heat that threatens to consume her. 

And if not, then all she needs is a knife. A long, twin-bladed—

Coldwater engulfs her so unexpectedly that she forgets to breathe.

"—up Emily! Wake up!" A woman shouts into her ear. "Open your eyes!" 

She does. And she is greeted by Meagan with a hand shaking her shoulder like an earthquake and the other wiping water from her face. The woman then squeezes the tendons by her jaw and Emily's mouth opens in reflex and draws in a sudden influx of air so quickly that she chokes into a coughing mess. 

Another pair of hands steady her as she heaves forward. She does not need to turn her head to know that Anton is holding her like a worried grandfather. 

Emily pants, drenched in water once cold. She is no longer burning, and the sea breeze comes through somewhere she realises now is the opened door of the cabin, cooling her in place of the cold ice that was the water. She realises that she was squeezed into a corner between the bunk and the heater, where her neck pressed right into the heated metal rims. 

Ah, so that was where the heat came from. And perhaps the shadow that grabbed her was the embodiment of the one that dragged her from Aramis Stilton's door the two days ago. 

Dreams are weird. 

She knows she hasn't been the same since then, having the cold of The Void ripped out of her by The Outsider that day. Fifteen years of ice, gone just like that. She never thought she would miss the safety that the god even gave, but here she is, drenched in cold water from the rude awakening of a nightmare. 

Emily looks up to Meagan, raising a hand and allowing both of them to pull her up steadily. 

"You alright?" Anton asks, "The first time I've ever seen you have a nightmare like that."

"I'm fine." She croaks, as they set her slowly on the bed despite her legs working fine. She just needed support to get out of the corner she squeezed into. 

Meagan and Anton are cautious. 

They eye her with an indescribable gaze that she doesn't feel like reading, but she does anyway because she is an Empress first who caters to her people's needs. She sees their discomfort, where Anton wants to get close to check on her, whether she is hurt or scared or in pain, and Meagan wants to be everywhere but here, seeing her own fears and nightmares flash before her eyes. 

She takes a breath in, deep and filling, and exhales slow, and stands. 

Emily looks up at both of them, alternating her gaze between them, a wry smile on her face, holding out her hands to calm their jittered nerves as they stand so close. 

"I'm fine, really. Just a nightmare." She grasps Anton's arm gently, watching him nod before casting an eye to Meagan. 

The woman watches her with two eyes, unknowing of the chaos that Emily ran through to save them. She pats her shoulder with a flesh hand, turning to leave. She knows Anton well, but not his unblooded granddaughter. 

"It's not legal obligation to go to your room after coming off of an adrenaline high, you know." Her words trail, her eyes hiding secrets to a past she won't ever talk about. "You could wind down first." 

Emily smirks. An easy solution. "I might just do that next time then." 

Meagan nods, leaving. 

Anton holds back, lingering. Overprotective and worried grandfather and all that. Emily laughs, the sound doesn't match her eyes and he doesn't call her out for it. 

"I'm okay, Anton." She reassures. "Go back to your painting. I know you can't wait to get back to Delilah."

A grey eyebrow raises in questioning. "Yeah? Well, Delilah can wait. She's just a captured moment." 

Emily rolls her eyes. _Painters_. 

She puts on a brighter smile, playful. She makes no show of the cavity cracking open in her chest. She has already fallen into the pit. 

"It's fine. I'm fine. Just a nightmare, nothing worrying. It's just been a little chaotic and it translated into my dreams." She says. 

And they both wish it were true. Anton leaves, reluctantly. Whenever she walks by his workshop, she sees the tremble in his hands, emotionally unwilling to continue the portrait of the wretched ex-apprentice of his, machinist mind wanting to complete a project. 

Days pass. Emily doesn't sleep again, spending the rest of the time discussing with Doctor Hypatia over the next course of their plans. 

The plans where they set into motion the culling of Delilah Copperspoon and the undertaking of her city back. 

It's not pretty. The day that they decide on the best plausible action, Emily falls asleep under her body's whims with a running mind. 

She wakes up drowning. 

* * *

The Outsider is cold to touch. Emily realises one day when she is taking a breather in the library and he is by her side, peering over her shoulder to read her book. 

She, of course, knows that very well, as the influences of The Void are _frigid_. 

Runes and Bonecharms are like wintry ice, never able to be held for long by others and just cold enough for her to be used as a cooler. Shrines dedicated to The Void and its entity always seemed to be part of another temperate entirely even if they are within the same heated apartment. The Void itself is no different, constantly blowing winds and meandering shadows in the absence of the sun. 

The Outsider is, of course, the same. But while everything else has the numbing curl of The Void's emptiness that makes them feel ethereal and generally otherworldly, Emily finds that she has grown used to the chill that emanates off his skin. She finds it soothing, like a cold dessert on a particularly hot day, like a menthol salve on a burning wound. 

She, of course, realises this as she also realises that she is laying against his cool arm, while it rests behind her head on the chaise. 

Timing has never been her forte. 

"Turn the page, Empress." He drawls, onyx eyes fixated on old yellowing pages. She is in the last paragraph of the page and she doesn't know how she has read so much and absorbed so little. 

She is twenty-two, and she feels as if she is already old and past her prime. 

Emily shuts the book with a smack, stunning herself in the process. When she looks back, she sees just a twitch of a furrowed brow. 

"I have to go back to work. Read it on your own if you want." 

And there she goes, sliding the book on the side table and out the door. Away from the soothing cold. 

Of course, The Outsider smiles in her absence.

* * *

Anton grabs her as she heads into the workshop spread across the cargo bay with the intention to upgrade her projectiles. He is starting to paint someone else, having already finished the portrait of Delilah. 

He makes her guess who it is by just overseeing the bare strokes of a jawline and a nose, familiar features swimming in her mind. 

"Mother? Alexi?" She questions, an eyebrow raised. She does not choke on either name. They fall into the chasm where her heart should be. Anton laughs at her efforts, a loud delighted one that Emily didn't realise she wanted to hear until she hears it. The less this speaks about the past few nights the better. 

"You can't even recognise your own nose and jaw, Emily?" He shakes his head in mock disapproval. "Jeez, I wonder how you even tell the difference between your bolts."

"Hey! Pardon me if I only listened in your philosophy lectures." She retorts, feeling herself loosen. She hitches a hand on her hip, scrutinising the sketch of the nose and the jaw. She still doesn't see it. "I think my nose is sharper than this."

"Any sharper your majesty, and you'll look like a shark." Anton grunts. Emily with a shark nose. They both snicker at the thought of the portrait being hung on Tower walls.

But Anton sobers up faster than he normally does. The mood falls as Emily sees the worry lining his serious face. He holds her by her elbow and forces all of her attention onto him. Brown eyes cut into her empty soul. 

This is the man she had argued philosophy for hours with. This is the man that had seen her grow up from a dainty white princess to a righteous and steeled Empress. This is the man that had a _say_ in how she grew up. 

This is Anton Sokolov, her grandfather that does not share her blood. Anton Sokolov who helped build her machinist mind. Anton Sokolov, who never minces his words. 

He looks at her with sorrow in his eyes. Looking at her but not. 

"I overheard your conversation with Doctor Hypatia." He starts. Emily knows where this is going. He is sure of that too. "I know you're not going to sacrifice anyone, Emily. Because I know you're going to sacrifice yourself."

She gives him a saddened smile. "Then why bother saying what you're going to say, Anton? You would only make it harder for yourself to accept."

It's not fair for her to say it like that, but she does. 

The grip tightens on her elbow. Anton's face falls, with a frown on his lips and his white eyebrows so knitted. She regrets her words. Minutely. 

"I know, Emily. But promise me you'll find another way. Promise me you'll think about your father. He already lost Jessamine, he wouldn't want to lose you too." He lets go. The warmth of his hand leaves her skin soothingly for the cool of the sea to return. 

She looks down at her hands. She knows that nothing will stop her from making this choice. There just needs to have a conduit to hold Delilah's spirit. She will not let anyone be the sacrifice. There will be nothing but her own body that will host Delilah. 

When she finally dies, the world will remember her as the Empress martyr. The Empress that sacrificed. She looks to the bare bones of her portrait. There are worse ways to be remembered and The Empress who died for The Isles is not one of them. 

When she looks at Anton, however, and her resolve cracks just a little. This old man in his late seventies had been her grandfather figure for the past fifteen years. He took her on wild rides of natural philosophy about the cosmos of the world and the questionable behaviours of men. Even when he had retired to Karnaca, the letters about his days were never sparse. He always shared what he found interesting on his travels even. She loved them all; reprieves to curb her wanderlust spurned from her immobile post.

As egoistic and analytically inhospitable as he usually is, people close to his heart are treated with such warmth, such understanding. And to her? He showered her with the same adoration he would have given to the blooded granddaughters he will never have the chance to meet. 

Emily places a hand on his frail shoulder. 

"I will try, Anton. But know that there hasn't been any other way that we've found so far." She promises. Anton nods gravely, patting her hand and returning it to her side. 

"That's all I ask, Emily."

She turns to the work table to work on adding an extra charge to the stun mines and bombs before making her way up to the deck, grabbing the crossbow arrows and sleep darts that he had manufactured more for her. 

She needs more equipment now more than ever. She bleeds more now, hurts more. It's not fun running across pipelines with a bleeding trail when it could be avoided by taking down lackeys when she sees them. 

Emily meets Meagan on the deck by the skiff, and the other woman has the same look as Anton's in her eye. 

"The past few days haven't been good for you, Emily. You look like shit to show for it." She states as matter-of-factly. 

Meagan feels like an aunt that she never had. 

She does have one. But she won't count that. 

"I know. Thanks for telling me." She says dryly. 

"Anton talked to you?" Meagan asks, paying her no heed and turning around to release the anchor of the Skiff. 

"He did. Are you going to say the same thing?" 

"You're the Empress, Emily. Who's going to be the next target for assassinations if you're gone?" She ponders. "If it's going to be Corvo, then may The Void bless the poor fool who tries."

Emily laughs at that. She imagines her father fighting off an assailant with a fork from dinner. A random specific thought that makes her feel like it has happened before. 

"It's _not_ going to be Corvo." She affirms. "Dunwall will fall into a little chaos before establishing itself officially as a democratic rule. It will be a new age." 

She's sure of that. Her father will avoid the throne like a Plague. With two regents dead during his tenure, the Parliament won't want him to even be remotely close to the next one. He would be the most likely candidate for regency given his tenure as Spymaster, but the people wouldn't want any more of them to protect either, given the chaos spawned during the past two decades. 

"Jeez. The whole world would be thrown into disarray, that's what you're going to do to all of us." Meagan shakes her head. Then turns back around to eye the Empress carefully. 

"There's no other way Meagan. Hypatia and I tried to find it, and I really did." Emily confesses. "I didn't want Anton to worry so I told him I would, but there really isn't. I need a live conduit to carry Delilah's spirit, and I'm not sacrificing any of my people for it." Not even if they were scums like Duke Luca Abele, joyously ignorant to suffering, dirt scuff on the side of their shoes. 

Meagan looks away. Releasing her defeat with a sigh. 

"The world will never be the same again. You ready to head out?" 

"I've never been anymore."

::

Emily enters the First Captain's office of Duke Luca Abele's opulent mansion and feels the pang of grief for Alexi. 

She doesn't falter like she did when she had killed Mortimer Ramsey in a fit of rage, she merely suffocates the Captain into unconsciousness and takes a break to eat the fruit platter. 

She misses her mother in her ears. She wonders what she will say, stealing food like this. Probably not a lot, knowing how many had died by her hands. She will argue that they were scum, but they were still her _people_. 

The Empress takes the Captain's incendiary and normal crossbow bolts and sneaks out to the corridor after checking the keyhole. She passes by a sleeping civilian in the seating room on her right, and after looking through the keyhole of the door of what is the grand communal dining room from her memory of the map she passed by, she sees the _number_ of guards circling the area and decides to take a detour to the side staircase by climbing to the inner balcony of the third floor. 

She takes out the guard by the door, crosses to the outer balcony, and sneaks by plush cushions and lush garden plants. It must be nice to be on the Duke's payroll. She wonders if her own servants wish they had more. A heedless question. They of course do. But Emily cannot afford to raise the minimum wages lest more the Aristocrats revolt, and support is what she really needs at this moment of whale crisis, and of Delilah's undertaking. Though really now, does she still? 

She heads down the staircase with no encounters from any guard nor servant, thankful that this staircase leads to the basement she needs to go to in the end after peering at a map she passed by and comes by two guards in her path. She waits by the corner of the door as the guards talk by the shelves opposite her, something about travels, and perhaps one is more pessimistic than the other. 

The pessimistic one turns. She grabs the nearest one, the one that wanted to visit other Isles, chokes him unconscious, and reaches for the other before he had even dropped to the ground. 

She had only visited Tyvia once. The coldness was just nice for her tastes and she loved the food. She hated how she couldn't sneak out at night to visit the landscapes of the surrounding mountains, with the police force being so tight on security. Though it is far from oppressive. The Isle merely rules democratically with an iron fist. 

She thinks of the night she accidentally sipped Corvo's poisoned Tyvian wine. In her defence, she thought it was a waste since her father doesn't even drink wine and she was experiencing the joy of legal drinking. The entire armed guard went into such disarray to lock down the entire villa, even the Tyvian Operators were on high alert. It was funny for a little while until it was quite a deadly poison. 

At least it was a good reason to see whether she could have mithridatism as training. Corvo didn't allow it. From then, either he or Alexi would test her food before service, and their own servants were pressured to constantly keep more of an open eye of her tray. It shouldn't be acceptable for others to be on the wrong end of poison meant to kill her but Corvo wouldn't have it any other way. Unless she wanted to eat the food he cooked and served. _Forever_. 

Emily surveys the entire room, eyeing the shelves, and the papers strewn all over. The centre of her attention always put on the conspicuous large wooden doors. 

Luca Abele's fortune is wasted on him. 

How does one hide a secret vault in a basement? By hiding it behind large double wooden doors. In the basement. Guarded with only two men.

And have a conspicuous button to unlock the said secret vault. 

The only protection that Delilah's statue has in this palace is the secret that it is even in here. 

Emily presses the said button and watches as the wooden double doors slide open, revealing a short and small stone foyer leading down to an undiscerning white wooden door. The must of the basement smells thicker here, though there is hardly a speck of dust in the cranny of each stone brick throughout the wall. 

She does not hesitate to enter the stone foyer, eyeing the archway and the sitting chairs that line the walls after it. 

Emily heads for the white door, peeking through the keyhole and pleased to find it as empty as expected. If anything, it was a sneak peek into what a secret room would look like in an excessively grandiose Palace sitting on a lone cliff overlooking the city.

The door opens without a need for a key, and Emily is greeted by a large heavy wood conference table at the heart of the bunker, carpeted at the feet. Several chairs sit along with the table, with messy contents such as books, bottles, and paper strewn carelessly across the surface. An organized investigation board stands by a pillar on the left of the room, pinned with various silvergraphs of Delilah's ritualists taken by Kirin Jindosh's invention, and an elegant cabinet sitting against the wall on her right, a large custom hand-drawn map of The Isles hanging above it. 

To her far left, there is an archway to a candlelit room, glowing suspiciously like the purple of a shrine. 

She enters and closes the white door behind her. 

After perusing through the various documents atop the table, and a skimming eye to the detailed map on the wall, she examines the investigative board. 

Silvergraphs of the ritualists, all smiling with the exception of The Crown Killer, who is hunched almost timidly by Luca Abele's side. Do they live in a delusion where Delilah's reign is causing only fear and oppression? Do they know what they have unleashed on this world, The Void, and existence itself? 

Emily doubts it. They know that Delilah will try to remake this reality to what she thinks it should be. She will control all life, all power. All of the future would be hers, and there will be no one to say that she couldn't. The world in the future will only know Delilah. If she could not make a city bow, she would make the world _kneel_. 

To her, power is taken by force. Force is years of planning, plotting, charming. Her intelligence leaves every plan of hers unchallenged. She will get what she wants, what everyone thinks they want. Her followers will forever be loyal. When they are in ruins, they will worship her still. 

She stares at the corner of the board, where Delilah's Silvergraph is carefully pinned. 

Emily is......half tempted to let her. To let her win, that is.

The Void is not her concern, never was. She could care less about how Delilah will destroy The Void in her lust for power. Her concern lay only in Dunwall, where her father has turned to stone. Her concern lay only in people. People like Meagan and Anton, who can learn to forget her. 

They will learn to grow neutral to her face. Just like The Outsider did. 

When she dies for the city, she knows that the whole world will tremble. The Isles, without a ruler. Without a monarch. They will push the next best thing on the throne as regent. Her father. Her father, who has been the failed protector of two generations of rulers, who will know how to run a state better than any other upon his tenure as Spymaster. But also, her father who would have lost his daughter and his lover within the span of fifteen years. Her father, who will decline and waste away in grief, throwing her city into chaos but will ultimately establish a democratic rule under her unblooded brother, Jameson Curnow. Because there will be no other. 

Emily feels the shuddering pain stemming from decisions that she has to make to save her city. And she wonders why she cannot let them live in a lie instead. No one would know. Their current turmoil, able to be blanketed.

"Damn you, Delilah." She hisses at the Silvergraphs, contemplates stabbing it, but moves away instead. It is too petty even for herself. 

The Empress moves to the candlelit room, where it should be giving off the feeling of a shrine. The chill she cannot feel anymore. The ritualists only worship one person, and she is not surprised to find a portrait of Delilah hung on a wall of shrouded wines and flowers. 

The room is only lit by candles on candelabras sitting at each corner. A wall of shrouded flowers and vines cascades down from the ceiling of the adjacent wall, where Delilah sits in the centre on an elegant vanity surrounded by poisonous flowers, dried herbs, and candles. A single lantern stands on the corner of the table, and a muted black whalebone lays on the purple tablecloth. 

Two artfully crafted tall backed chairs sit in the middle of the room on a circular carpet. 

Everything is artfully placed, a shrine of worship, a sacrilegious room to make the narcissistic worshipped proud of their dedication. 

But what catches her eye is the knife laying atop the chair closest to her. 

A twin-bladed knife. 

Long bronze straight blades held by a metal sabre with a muted gold curved crossguard. 

She recognises the knife instantly. She had seen it up close in the hands of the unhinged cultist that decided to sacrifice a fifteen-year-old boy merely because meteorological signs had coincident. She had seen it at the head of the stone slab that a mortal had died on to become a god. She had felt it. A cold carve down her neck, vivid even in her dreams.

Emily's breath is knocked out of her in defeat. 

In _relief_.

Her shoulders fall, like a weight has been lifted and she can finally loosen. It is all the confirmation in the world that she needs to do what must be done. 

The knife is before her. The knife of sacrifice. The knife of death and life. The beginning and the end. 

Emily bypasses the muted black whalebone entirely and moves to pick up the knife. 

There is no great burst of light nor a horrid exclamation of howls. There is no burst of wind whirling into the room, not even a whisper of a word. She does not feel a great heat of energy filling her veins. She picks up the knife and just like any other in the world, nothing happens. 

She sighs in relief, feeling the weighted metal in her hands, looking at how the flicker of each orange fire light gleams off the edge of each blade. 

The Void does not want Delilah dictating it's every capability. She corrupts the emptiness in the space, replacing the raw hunger with her own power lust. The Void is not made to be subjected to will. It is a will of its own. The Outsider merely seeks to inhabit the eternal emptiness. He merely keeps The Void company, to overlook the many lands and stones. 

Delilah is a stranger. An unwelcomed _outsider_. Part of The Void she may be, but she is a detested part of The Void. 

Emily sees her split reflection in the old blades. 

Tired eyes look back at her. A pale face. A worn expression. 

But relieved. 

When she moves to clasp the blade on her belt by her leg, it folds in half, turning and closing into the sabre like her father's sword hanging by her side. 

She stares at the closed sword in amazement. She is liking this knife more and more every moment. 

Emily tucks the knife in a pouch instead, moving out of the shrine room.

She has a duty to fulfil. A person to defeat. 

When she steps out, she hears the monotonous intonation of a clockwork soldier from the other side of the safe door where she is sure Delilah's statue is housed in. Of course. No human error in protecting the spirit of their worship. 

Wasting no time, she grabs a wine bottle sitting atop the table and straps a stun mine on it. Emily then swiftly unlocks the safe door with the key that she obtained from the real Luca Abele. She creaks the door open just slightly for her body to slip in silently and closes it to a hair's breadth to prevent any sound from travelling inside and out. 

Another extravagantly marvelling room greets her at the end of a short stone walkway. 

Rectangular stone pillars rise from a circumference at the centre of the circular room, decreasing in radius as it reaches the high rise ceiling. The wall of the circular room is lined with shelves, all filled with nameless wonders and the occasional gold ingot. 

The terrace on the second floor is brightly lit, bathing the entire room in a cool amber glow with lanterns emitting yellow light sitting atop the majestic gargoyles guarding the other end of the walkway. At the centre of the room, down radial steps where a great tree stands impressively, is the winged skeleton statue that houses Delilah's spirit at its base. 

From where she stands, she hears the clambering metal steps of the clockwork soldier coming closer at every second. Emily stalks undetected to the rectangular pillar before her and peers out to watch the movements of the robot as it walks in her direction. 

As it steps to the pillar just before hers, she activates the stun mine and breaks into a sprint towards the robot. She drops to a slide to avoid the swing of a blade, passing by under the soldier and then throwing the bottle at its aviary shaped head. 

Emily flips to a crouch a distance away, safely watching the stun mine explode, sending a burst of blue streaks of electricity brighter than usual through the soldier and then itself explodes in a display of red fire and grey smoke. 

It was a good idea to upgrade her explosives, she thinks. 

The Empress stands, already cooling down from the burst of adrenaline. Brushing off imaginary dirt, she slips the twin-bladed knife out of her pouch and lets it unfold itself with a flick. She walks to the statue. 

"How fitting." She says to the statue, with how the stone wings cross over to cover the bodice of the human skeleton inside. 

Delilah hiding her darkness within. Beautiful and majestic on the outside, full of lush feathers and a sense of an alluring mystery. She is unique, splattered with vivid colours, attractive to every eye.

On the outside, Delilah is breathtaking.

Her inside is a rotten core, dead and all bones since long ago. Her inside is more space than flesh. She is a constant lust for hunger. She is an emptiness that consumes only power. 

And this. This is the spirit that Emily will share her body with, from today forth, up until her death. 

The Empress stands still, closing her eyes and breathing in the smell of old antiques and priceless artefacts, thinking to a time she feels so long ago where she stood atop stone with forgotten fragments of the past standing before her. 

Her ears, they hear the still sparkling delicate circuits of the clockwork soldier and nothing else other than her breathing. It makes her remember the days when her father taught her to rewire machines and how to destroy them with the barest touch of electricity. She licks her lips and she tastes the dried sweetness of the grapes and the apples she ate in the First Captain's room and oh, how she misses Alexi with an ache still carving deeply in her throat. 

Her heart calms, beating slower and lazier, and she yearns for her mother's embrace, her voice in her ear, her heart in her hand. She wishes she was still here, whispering soft secrets and telling her how much she loved her. She can feel her blood in her ears, and her nerves as they cool in this cold vault, knowing that even when she dies, she will never see her mother again. Because that is what it will mean for her, for someone who will be tainted much darker with The Void than she already had been. 

Emily feels the numbing emptiness of The Void in her hand, an unforgettable familiar salve, the knife that calls her name, and in that bittersweet moment, she longs for the touch of cold hands. She longs for his comfort, his lulling intonations, his quiet muses, his steady presence. She longs his dark eyes that see everything and nothing, she longs for the frigid embrace of The Void and laments the fact that he will never know how much she _loved_ him. 

She opens her eyes, chest sunken into the chasm, to the frost that is the statue that houses a part of the all-consuming, barren Void. 

She had gone to Doctor Hypatia, just after walking off the dark of night after saving Aramis Stilton from insanity. She had asked about Delilah's spirit, how to end the woman once and for all, and the answer was pooled from the speculation of both a ritualist and a scientist. 

It is easily done in theory. Because spirits without hosts crave flesh more than anything. All they truly require is a willing body for the spirit to tether to. 

Or that's what Hypatia had said. There are many holes in their speculations. The most being _possession_ , where _what if Delilah's spirit takes control of the body instead of sitting back and enjoying the ride?_ Coming to play. And the next being, _what if they're totally wrong because they understood nothing about The Void's logic?_ But with the notes spurned from Breanna Ashworth and whatever Hypatia remembered from so many countless tests with Oracular devices, the worry only comes from a professional's insecurity. 

And at the moment, playing by their backhanded theory, all they need is a person to tether Delilah's spirit. A person full of life, and unblemished, unconnected to anything. Untethered. 

And what most convenient conduit is there, but the person who has been helping to curb all of Delilah's sympathisers? 

(Though it is only in her eyes. Hypatia thinks that any ol' guard or even Luca Abele would do, nevermind the fact that she won't be able to carry either of them past the guard work around the mansion.) 

Her blood will be the conduit that this spirit will flow through. The freshest life force, still flowing, still full of more life than the human skeleton that it now houses itself in, And when she defeats the narcissistically infallible Delilah, Emily will sacrifice herself to kill the spirit that would be hosting within her body.

It is simple. She is standing before the wretched statue of Delilah's spirit. She knows what she needs to do. She feels the validated relief coming from The Void in her hands.

But her heart still races. Her legs are still feeling numb. Her nerves flare as she pulls back the sleeve of her left arm. Her hands, when she raises the knife to the skin of her arm, they still shake. 

"There is no other way." She says mournfully, surely, to Anton, to Meagan, and most of all, to her father. 

Because there isn't. Not really. 

The sting comes when the knife slides deep so easily into her forearm. She clenches her teeth and she does not stop. As she brings the knife down to her elbow, blood seeps out and she wonders how the ache in her chest can feel more painful than the cut. 

The knife slides down her forearm, deep into her flesh and the blood spills out in a calm, beating flow and drips off her skin. When she pulls back the cultist knife, she is panting in the adrenaline and she can see the white of her tendon in a pool of blood within the laceration. 

Emily exhales shakily and flicks the blood dripping from the twin blades onto the statue. 

Light bursts from the statue like an explosion as the wings open with a gust of cold wind. A torrent of black smoke and amber ash swirls out of the heart of the statue with the red of fire and dives into the wound of her arm as if being sucked into a vacuum.

Instantly, Emily feels raw frigid ice _burn_ up her arm and she collapses to her knees in pain with a scream. 

The knife clatter to the ground but she only feels glacial shards moving into her arm and up to her shoulder, pouring into her heart. She is being frozen from within, and how it burns like the wildfire in her dreams. 

She howls as Delilah's spirit moves through her blood, leaving frost in its wake. Reluctant tears stream down her face and she collapses to her back on the floor, rolling into her side, clutching her hand close. 

Above her, the statue bursts into fragments with amber light, and a repelling force implode from within. 

Emily wrecks in a shudder as the cold settles on her nerves. 

_"What is this? The body of my niece? How interesting."_

Delilah's voice rings loud in her head. Unable to be ignored. She is as loud as her own thoughts. A spirit, hosting a live body.

 _"I shall enjoy this ride, niece. Never stop amazing me. You are_ delightful _."_

Unlike her mother's heart, Emily cannot put Delilah away. Though at the very least, her body is still controlled by herself. 

Emily groans. A pain in her arm, an unfading cold in her body, a weight on her shoulders. She tries to pull herself to a stand on shaky legs, requiring the aid of the stone platform that Delilah's statue once stood. 

Emily picks up the two-bladed knife with an apology and tucks it back into her pouch with a flick. 

_"How peculiar. The knife that birthed The Outsider, in your hands."_

And now, does the pain in her arm actually register. Emily exhales in both burning agony and annoyance at the cut staining her folded sleeve maroon. 

She pulls out bandages from her pouch and sets about to dress the pulsating wound like how Corvo taught her, albeit with much higher difficulty, hissing in pain at every twist of her wrist. She starts from her hand for the bandage to grab a hold of, then slowly wraps in a layered spiral down the length of her arm in a tight but breathable fashion. When she is satisfied with the thickness of the layers, Emily slices the bandage and unrolls her sleeve back over her arm. 

She pouches the bandages and moves to arm her crossbow when she realises that she has to stretch for it. She groans. If she has to take a second more than usual to get her equipment then there is no point in fighting for her life. She would just stand there and let her enemies shoot her without even trying to get her weapons because it would result in the same. 

Emily resigns and unclasps her belt, deciding to rearrange her equipment right there and right now since not a soul would be able to come in here and look for her without Luca Abele's vault key. 

She moves her swords to her left, seeing as she would not use them often if she normally sneaks past all her obstructions, and now even more so. The pouch of her crossbow bolts is shifted closer to her right, and so are her explosives. Her loot pouch remains at the centre. 

When she is done, Emily doesn't clasp her belt back on her waist. She slings it across her chest and allows her swords to be on her back instead. 

As she turns to the staircase leading to the second floor of the vault, Delilah speaks again. 

_"Strategy. It runs in the family blood. Not quite sure of your side though. My sister was perhaps a great thinker, but so horrendous at planning."_

Emily frowns at the accusation. 

Emperor Euhorn, from what she had read from old journals, gave birth to a revolution to old times. He kick-started the prosperity that citizens of Dunwall now enjoy on good days, with the Kaldwin Bridge being able to accommodate large carriage traffic and the efficient maintenance of Dunwall's utilities to prevent disaster. He bridged the class difference by encouraging public visits to the beautiful Tower grounds. 

Perhaps, he was a great thinker, to prevent problems. But not so great a planner apparently, seeing how Delilah's life had turned out into a devastating problem. 

And Emily herself knows that most of her plans nowadays are spontaneous. Only does she plan for the little things. They were once long term. She loved to play the long game; getting the Parliament to turn more empire serving than a privy council would, developing and growing an economy by trade investments and specified restorations. 

An _arduous_ long game. 

Emily wilfully ignores every word from the unwelcomed parasitic voice in her head. 

* * *

**_"_ **

_He looks down at her, sliding the back of a finger against fragile skin, flushed cheeks mottled with dripping tears, wiping away salted water._

_She holds herself still. Clenched jaw, and bleeding fists from pricked palms. It is not sadness that breaks her now. It is anger. White hot and scalding. He sees it in the beautiful control slipping under her skin. How tightly she holds herself lest she lashes out._

_He pulls back far away, flicking her tear where it gathered on his finger._

_"The young Empress, squandered by her own people." He taunts. "Is this how she will rule?"_

_Emily snarls, throwing her pen at him with startling accuracy. He tilts his head with a raised brow for it to miss._

_"Damn you! Why didn't you say anything then? Why would anyone let them live? Why?" She shouts through clenched teeth, clawing her hair._

_"Is there a point in asking if you cannot do anything about it?"_

_She turns to him, looking as if to shout again, but he sees how air hitches in her throat, and she falls instead. Her insecurities and anxiousness blossoming into a delicate mess._

_Her hands fly to her mouth and she screams wetly into her palm, nails leaving indents around her lips. He moves to pull them away before they draw blood. He knows how she wants to suffer in relative silence._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like channelling my inner John Green.
> 
> @LemonDemon_but_like_Sadder  
> I like you too man.  
> @Meggiee  
> Honey, practice practice practice. You'll get to where you're satisfied to be.


	5. Humanity is a drawl, he thinks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blood, cold and splattered red, stark on white marble. Solace, even if it is unorthodox.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored.

* * *

**"**

_It is a mark on her skin. Stark black and contrasting against the pale pallor of pink._

_Emily closes her eyes minutely and she feels the chill of his lips, soothing the burn of the mark away with a press._

_She watches opal eyes, glittering depths capable of mesmerising an unknowing child. She wonders what she sees in them, through the haze of her curiosity._

_She knows what he sees through them, she remembers the cold nights of slithering truths, twisting with wispy tendrils of smoke and ashes. And of course, the monotonous drawl of Aristocratic gossip that will make her raise her eyebrows at. But she wants to know why she finds him...intriguing._

_"What do you think of me wearing your name like a noose around my neck, Outsider?"_

_She sees the sharpening of glossy eyes. Shimmering with interest._

_"Would you rather wear anyone else's?"_

**"**

**_Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be._ **

* * *

She makes her way to the second floor, then upon hearing the monotone voice of a machine conducting a diagnostic scan beyond the vault door that would perhaps lead to the outside, she wastes no time opening the door, hearing the series of locks that click open and then peeking her head out of a slit to scan the other side. 

It is the outside; she feels the warmth before even looking, where the vault door leads to an open terrace with an electrically charged floor trap connected to a Whale Oil generator box hiding in the adjacent corner on her right. She eyes the connected walkway with too high of a vine and column wall to see through, leading to a path out of her sight, keeping an ear for the clockwork soldier. 

It is starting to light out, with the blue of dawn peeking over the sea and the pinkish hues swathing the horizon like an abstract painting. The overhead dome glass of the balcony terrace allows a view of the navy skies that are starting to lighten and coupled with the stone columns of the structured terrace, this place makes for a breathtaking view of the sea, cliff, and horizon. 

Emily waits for the machine to walk a little further beyond her hearing before she opens the door wider for her to leap onto the power generator box. 

She closes her left hand around the pipe of the generator for a grip in reflex and instantly forces down a curse through her teeth in pain. 

Free running, much less said about climbing, is going to be such a _chore_. 

Emily opens the generator cap and pulls out the whale oil that powers the floor trap. She holds the barrel of whale oil and shuffles to the edge of the wall adjacent to the corridor, peeking over to the walkway to check for the soldier as it clambers in her direction. 

Mustering up strength, she swings the barrel at the clockwork soldier and sprints into the corridor. A glance beyond the vines reveals a white staircase that leads to a floodlight illuminated boat dock tucked in a corner way down below. 

She flings herself through the shrubs without hesitation, making sure to use her right hand on the balustrade, and escapes the lasting reach of the exploding clockwork soldier. 

She breaks into a roll as she lands on the stair landing with a bit of breath knocked out of her lungs. Emily hops onto the railing of the stairs without stopping for a breather and leaps for the next flight of stairs towards the dock hidden behind jutting rocks. 

Emily hides by the corner where the floodlights do not reach, panting away adrenaline and fighting the temptation to sit on a sea kissed armchair she finds hiding in the shadows with her as well. 

In a distance, she sees the dot that is Meagan, noticing her as she starts over. 

Emily takes a moment to enjoy the mountain framed view of the coral sunrise mixing with pastel blue skies and crawling over the crystal crusted surface of the navy sea. She takes a breather then, of the morning dew and the fresh air, before hopping onto the jagged rock lining the white stone wall surrounding the Duke's palatial home to meet Meagan on the open sea. _And_ a better view of the sunrise. 

She wishes she has a Silvergraph machine to take the view of the sunrise now, to leave behind for her father. And perhaps Anton, though it is likely he would have seen better ones during his travels. 

She breathes in calmly, already feeling her blood cool in spite of the glacial chill already in her veins, waiting—

_"Billie Lurk. Such a good girl, that one. But no loyalty," Chiding. "betraying Daud like that to me."_

And exhales as if there was a visceral punch to her gut. 

The only thing that registers is the knife drenched in _betrayal_. A poison seeping into her bloodstream under the cold, a voracious fire setting alights the fuel to the anger that is starting to boil at her core. 

_What in The Void._

They worked together. _They_ worked together. Emily would think that she wouldn't know which one to be more outraged at but _no._ The death of her mother still outweighs the fall of Dunwall, thousands to one. Because it is _personal_. Meaga— _Billie Lurk_ worked together with the Assassin that _killed_ her mother. 

Red pooling cold on marble floors. Stark in her memories.

She worked together with the usurpers that helped orchestrate her Mother's death. Her death resulted in so much situational catastrophe not just in the whole of Gristol, but of herself as well. Agonising drowning, filled with a swirling storm of nothingness. 

The Outsider must have been so _amused_ with this turn of events. He must have smiled so gleefully when he had a glimpse of this future. 

Her father had spared that old fool who stabbed the sword into her mother, but let it not be unsaid that her father will always be a greater person than herself. She is not her father. She is like him, but she is an Empress first and she will forever cull danger at its _root_. She is so much less forgiving. She is far more ruthless as leaving a person alive to drown in their faults is worse torture than death. She knows first hand the torture of sorrow.

It is so _easy_ , to fall into this hate. 

A swing of a sword, righteous justice executed. _Literally_.

But Emily is an _Empress_. 

She is a philosopher first, then a killer. She is a thinker, rather than a planner. Her hands were pale and clean, once upon a time when she found it in herself logically to not exact any capital punishment against the entire Conspiracy, even stopping her father from doing so to Hiram Burrows no matter how much grieving pains he would have caused her in the future. She reads the underneath of the underneath, rather than taking words as it is.

She took the rationale behind the usurp and she made sure her rule would be _different_. She reformed her Council, her father was both trusted Spymaster and Royal Protector, and her parliament, blood-thirsty wolves they may be, do have the pacifistic betterment of The Empire in mind. Her Empire was flourishing. Nothing went past her eye after she was eighteen, and everything was _straight_ until the Crown Killings.

Emily, despite half of her mind protesting by thinking about how many ways she can make this cold-blooded mercenary suffer, thinks about the actions that the woman had done so far. 

Billie Lurk played Meagan Foster and ferried Emily around the Isles to put an end to the followers of Delilah. She suggested it, the next course of action. It would be a genuine attempt at asking for forgiveness and truly apologising for her past, or it would be part of a diabolical and twisted plan to cut away any ties that may threaten Delilah's regime, like what the Loyalist Conspiracy did to her father in the corrupted end. Turning against him because they think they could do better. 

It is a gamble. The woman spoke of a past she chose not to speak about, whether out of a secrecy she had sworn to or in shame, Emily has to observe. 

Delilah made the fact known for no reason other than to incite a response from her. An observation for her to enjoy the outcome of. Emily sees that she is either ruining the identity of her follower or just playing her for laughs with that tone of hers. 

But most of all, ringing in her mind, is the sense of a growing weight on her own shoulders. 

The thought of having to deal with the fallout of either outcome. A betrayal that she would kill for, or a betrayal she will bypass at the ending dregs of her pitiful life. 

The world is a much more peculiar place than she ever thought it to be, and she has known it to be far more treacherous than she could ever survive through since she was eight. She had thought it manageable when she was twenty, with seemingly only her problems being able to possibly bring her down in a distant future. And then the weight of such a revelation coming back to her when she was twenty-two caused her to spiral, and crash, and burn, writhing in uncertainty as if the tumulting human emotions she was put through during her younger years weren't enough.

Watching the Skiff come closer, Emily just feels so tired. The drama of life. The constant hunger for power around her. She knows the yearning for control, to spin events that influence an Isle-wide number of people and more. But it is also so much _more_. Power, is a responsibility in light of human morals. To be used wisely just like how knowledge is carefully and specifically applied. The Outsider is a partial given example. He is an entity who holds the power to sway entire realities but is chained under the thumb of forces also larger than his own capabilities. He watches humanity writhe in their mortality between the limbo of living and dead, and he picks some of them to dance to spurn widespread events for a dictated future. 

Even if they were respected, acknowledged and powerful in their own right, humanity will always be under his thumb. And Delilah broke free from that all because of her lust for control. The wish to recreate and reform reality into the one it should be. No god, but herself. No religion, but her own. Power, defined by the ability of The Outsider. Power, hers. 

It is a disheartening possibility for Meagan to be under her thumb.

She moves to remove her father's mask from her face, hanging it on her belt. She doesn't want to drag out the possible battle tension any more than it would. 

When she can see the features of Meagan's face, with that casual smile playing on her, Emily's resolve falters just a tad. She is so angry, and the hatred that burns within her is of a renewed vigour, but she is also tired of the world's drama. 

Emily pulls the Two bladed knife from her back, unfolding it with a flick, and she watches Meagan— _Billie Lurk's_ face fall, no doubt knowing of Hypatia's cautions. 

"Delilah." She hisses, voice dripping with venom as she pulls up by the rocks before Emily, knowing that the plan of letting a soul inhabit a body may outright resulting in the take over of the host.

_"Oh, so interesting."_

"Travelling the world to kill my people, Girl?" The lethality in her voice is so foreign, yet so perfect in her ears. As if Delilah was speaking, blending into her body more than just her blood. "And here I thought one betrayal was enough for a lifetime." 

Billie snarls, a hand releasing the motor handle for a knife on her belt, rising to a steady stand atop a rocky boat. "What have you done to Emily, _Witch_?" She exclaims, spitting the end of her sentence with the rancour of rotten fruit. 

Genuine. Emily reads. Perhaps catching onto the hope too eagerly. But the woman's past is kept covered in a blanket of shame she refuses to tug at. 

Betrayal is an ugly thing. The person on the receiving end of it will live in poison, burning in the shame of their own thinking about how the person that betrayed them should be dead rather than the one they killed.

Betrayal is hideous, a well with a never-ending pit that guarantees constant falling into a void of bitterness. Betrayal is unrelenting because it is so much easier to break when a person has already been broken. 

Betrayal carries forward into distrust. Which carries into hate and denial and lastly, death. 

In Emily, it makes her shoulders fall. The genuine anger that she bleeds into her eyes, they fade back into her cold, dying heart to rest for another day. 

The Empress flicks the knife back into its sabre and sheaths it back into its pouch, and Billie's eyes widen upon the realisation of her actions as it dawns on her. 

The darker woman drops her knife and sits back down onto the boat, never breaking the passive eye contact with Emily. 

"I'm still here, Meagan," Emily reassures. Albeit now feeling the crash and burn of the past two—now three—days of lack of sleep, and one where she ended up in seawater. "I'm not going to forgive you for helping kill my mother, but it's part of a past that you seem to be ashamed of." Emily sounds so nonchalant in her ears that she knows the shock on Meagan—Billie— _Meagan's_ face is warranted. 

She steps onto the Skiff, careful with sitting down and resting her body against the head of the boat. Watching Meagan watch her. 

_"How boring."_

"Let's talk about it later. I feel a little tired now." Emily says. 

Meagan nods numbly, her hands moving to start the motor, finally looking away. Down at her boots first, then at her working hands.

"So that's it then? The fall of Karnaca?" She dares to ask, pulling the Skiff back out to the open sea.

Emily hums, leaning forward to rest her uninjured arm atop the side of the boat, facing the slow-rising sun. 

"I hope not. From now on, the Duke will be guided by better stars." She assures. 

"And Delilah? You really had me there just now." 

"You don't appreciate an evil woman wearing my skin?" Emily asks jokingly, raising an amused brow. Meagan scoffs, rotating the boat towards the Dreadful Wale. 

"I don't appreciate you being evil _at all_." She stresses. 

Emily huffs out a laugh and raises her left hand to reveal the bandage peeking from her sleeve. 

"No one avoids fate, Billie. Not you, not me, not Delilah." She says determinedly, cryptically.

The woman before her sighs. "Don't mind me if I take a longer time to Dunwall then. No one is in a hurry to meet their fate either."

That, Emily thinks, she agrees with. 

When Meagan pulls up onto the Dreadful Wale, it is just in time to notice that the wound on her arm is starting to bleed through the bandages and into her sleeve.

And that her blood now ran black. 

Emily looks at the murky black paint leaking from the bandages, mixing with streams of red that had bled through before. Meagan is staring at it too. 

She doesn't think she's a whole human now. Perhaps she never was one after those days spent with The Outsider. Spent in The Void. Always something changing in her, changing into something she never seems to recognise after she realises it. 

She can feel the frigid ice of Delilah crawling in her veins, pumping with her blood. The thoughts in her head are not hers alone anymore, but of someone else and she fears she won't be able to differentiate between them after prolonged exposure. 

Emily pulls her sleeve back down, securing her hand through the finger holes of the extended sleeve. 

She wonders, as Meagan locks the boat in place: what would The Outsider say now?

Nothing, perhaps.

::

Anton greets her with a half-finished portrait in the workshop. He has completed the top half of her portrait, where her hair is twisted in her signature bun and her eyes are painted sharp. He has painted the bridge of her nose down, but it ends there with her jaw lined since last night and her mouth missing.

Anton Sokolov uses classic colours for his paintings. He captures every trait of his subject, and he colours them onto his canvas with his muted paints and precise strokes, far unlike the colourful bursts of geometric swatches of Delilah's art. 

The portrait looks serious. Dark eyes staring right into her own. The background is black, like all of his portraits of pale faces. It calls out her eyes, with her stare pinning her to the spot and looking into her soul. She knows now that the Emily Anton is trying to portray is the Empress that The Isles had seen ruling over them during the better days. 

The Empress who looked over her subjects, trying to maintain and enhance the quality of living. The Empress who had lost her mother and the Empress who had became a monarch when she was ten. The Empress who had brought the city back from the clutches of death. The Empress who had succeeded in the communal of every societal person. 

And Emily, upon looking at her portrait, is so, _so_ tired. 

She knows her talents. She knows how much she has done for Dunwall and the entire _damning_ Isles, little as she had. 

But she doesn't know how to keep ruling under the loss of existential comfort that didn't seem to even be there in the first place for the past fifteen years. She doesn't know if she would want to pull the Abbey of The Everyman back together after they had crumbled under Delilah, from what she had read from the still running Newspapers. She doesn't know why she should make the rest of the Isles trust her rule again after Dunwall has gone through two usurps in the span of fifteen years, especially under a lineage with so many passionate dethronements. Because if someone wanted to oust another so much so that they would allow the fall of an Empire, then perhaps there is something most definitely wrong with the rule. And since she has Delilah crawling in her veins and tainting her blood black, Emily knows she doesn't need to. 

She may be an Empress first, of working hands that never stopped writing, of willpower easily enabling The Isles to work at peak efficiency, of ensuring productivity, never wavering. At the last dregs of her prideless life, she, at the very least, knowing how her Empire will most definitely turn out in the end because she knows that everyone is tired of monarchs who sit on a throne of blood, merely needs to write her postmortem delegations on a piece of scrap paper that Anton, with Meaga _—_ _Billie Lurk's_ support, will begrudgingly and mournfully deliver. And that is all she will need to do. She doesn't need to care what comes after. She will be _dead,_ uncaring as the world continues to spin, because she, as an Empress, did the most any monarch could do. 

Selfless, _irrevocable_ , _sacrifice_. 

And Anton is showing this. In the last portrait that will ever be of Empress Emily Kaldwin the First when she was still alive. The last portrait of _any_ Kaldwin.

In the eyes of Dunwall, Emily will die as the Empress who gave her life in hopes for them to prosper. The start of a new age. 

"I should ask you to paint more of me before we reach Dunwall if this is going to be how I turn out." She comments, pulling her belt over her head and placing it onto the work table, never taking her eyes off.

"I was hoping I wouldn't need to draw any more of you on this ship, your majesty," Anton confesses. He turns, palette in hand, observing her. 

_"Ah, the old master. Always ahead of himself. He always hoped to change me. He may have started from the bottom, but he certainly didn't understand what it was like to start from the dirt."_

Emily smiles wryly, fetching for the first aid box underneath the table. "You just capture me well, Anton." 

"Pah! It's just a painting. No one will ever capture you well enough like those Silvergraphs that Jindosh invented." He sets the palette down, heading for her equipment. 

"Must be poison for you to admit that." Emily remarks. "Have you dropped from your peak so early?" 

"I retired years ago Emily. I am the past. Kirin Jindosh was meant to be the future." 

Emily thinks of the man she strapped to the electrotherapy chair. 

Perhaps. His inventions were revolutionary. He would have been great if he wasn't utterly devoted to Delilah's prospective futures. He would have also been greater if their current time was able to keep up with his ambitions.

She looks at Anton, seeing his frail body still recovering from the convulsive torture that Jindosh had put him through. She still feels that shocking the Grand Inventor was not enough to do the same emotional damage, even if she knows what she has done to the man. A drooling mess. Too scrambled to even keep up with himself. Perhaps a loss to the Empire, but that is.

"Can you help me expand the capacity of how many sleeping darts I can carry?" She asks, changing the topic at hand. They don't talk about what they should. "I may find the need to use even more of those."

Anton scrutinises her. Eyeing the lack of use in her left hand and the way she had hung her belt before she took it off.

"Anything for you, Emily." He says. A grave tone in his voice. 

Her smile holds for a little while. "Thank you, Anton."

It falls when she turns to head to her cabin.

::

Delilah does _not_ stop talking. 

_"How peculiar. The taste of the Void is prevalent even here."_

And it does not help that every time she reminds Emily she is in her head, the glacial frost in her veins _pulse_ as it crawls in her blood. 

_"Such heresy, girl. Being touched by The Void. What would your people say?"_

Emily is trying to sleep. It is starting to crawl into the high noon of the third day that she has not gotten enough rest, and she is bone wearily exhausted. Delilah, annoyingly enough, is not helping her state of mind by continuously making comments about everything that she does. 

When she had gone into the showers that morning, Delilah had commented on the battle-hardened body that Emily walks around in. 

_"How terrifying; All scars and no softness. What man will ever want to touch you?"_

Emily had punched the mirror. Shattered it. Pulling back with a cut-up fist bleeding black, because she _doesn't_ need to add body insecurities to her list of personal problems. And the spirit said something about the bad luck that the action will bring her. Like she _cares_ when the spiritual embodiment of a part of The Void is in her blood already. 

_"Unproductive girl, why do you not seek a faster way to get me back to my body?"_

Emily screams soundlessly into her pillow. She pulls herself up in a mix of hazy rage and weighted fatigue, jumps to her feet, and pushes out of her cabin room towards Doctor Hypatia's laboratory across the ship. 

She knocks on the door but she doesn't wait for an answer before entering. The audacity of her rudeness will come to bite her in the morning when she wakes. She doesn't care about it at the moment. 

_"Ah. Alexandria Hypatia. Such an efficient killer. Always trailing loyal blood. None of that now, though."_

"So sorry for intruding on you, Doctor Hypatia." She starts, looking at the woman as she jumps, luckily only holding a pen to a journal. Emily would hate herself even more if she caused any dangerous accidents. "I—

"Ah, your majesty you're back. I didn't hear you." She interrupts, clambering to her feet and moving to a side table. "I have something for you. I finished it while you were visiting the Duke of Karnaca." 

She swipes a small bottle of unlabeled white tablets from the side table, stunning The Empress into silence. 

_Oh_. 

"Oh. What…" without her even asking, really. She knows that they are, and oh, this woman is such a dear. 

"I know you haven't been sleeping quite well lately. I apologise if this is out of line." She says, offering the bottle. Knowing is an understatement. Dunwall would forever be in the debt of the scientist who jumped into the sea to save their Empress. "These pills will help you. They are more special than the commercial ones out there and I added a fourth of an elixir to aid in bodily repairments for you. These make sure your body gets the rest it needs before you wake up. Take them whenever you wish to sleep, though I warn you, do not take another within twenty-four hours after you wake."

Just the thing she needs. (Maybe she will sleep forever. The lead in her bones have roots in her head.)

Emily nods. "I'll make sure to heed your orders, Doctor Hypatia."

"Rest well, your majesty." She bids with a smile. Curt. 

Emily leaves, closing the door behind her and moving to her room. She pops a pill into her mouth and dry swallows it before she even reaches her door. 

_"How delicate you are, resorting to help to curb your own problems."_

Emily checks on her wound as she waits for the medication to kick in. 

It does, just barely a few minutes later, when she is unable to fight the black haze that falls over her with a weight on her still bleeding arm. 

* * *

She knows this feeling. Panic and mania swirling and swirling into a turbulent tornado in the cavity of her empty chest, where a tiredly beating heart on the verge of collapse inhabits. 

It is currently a parliament session. 

She is on her seat at the head of the room, a lazy sun at her back through paned windows, her father on his seat by her, and the rest of her council laid across the long board table by the two sides of the room. 

They are talking about the rising shortage of Whale Oil, discussing legislation to aid the situation. It took two years for this matter to reach even their ears, and less than for it to be in her own. She had sent for Advisor Helmswater to gather shreds of evidence from slaughterhouses, docks, and whaling ships in the past years, and she has compressed all of her reports into bulleted points in briefing letters for Parliament session this morning. 

They are talking. 

Emily is half-heartedly listening because of the sudden seizing pressure in her chest, straining and tugging. Her grip on her pen tightens ever so slightly, and her mind calls for her to distract herself before her father notices. 

She twirls her pen, raising her eyes to scan down the aisle of officials on either side of the room. Her eyes roam the myriad of colours of the books on shelves behind them. She glances over to the globe at the further corner, the yellow sun streaming through that window there. Her eyes catch on a swirling vine, gold and clean, popping out of the cover of a book in the far end. 

She has seen that once. On a teacup, almost ten years ago. 

"Officiates." She calls for attention. Something is on her mind. Something. Something. 

The cold of the shadows is prevalent in the weary sun. 

But perhaps that is just her because when she rises for some reason, the world glows vividly and blurs, the shadows in the corner of the walls bleed over the reds and browns of the room and every single face blends into the solitary colour of tanned ochre. 

Brown eyes. Heated. Worried. Blurred. 

The bubble in her head muffles everything there is for her to hear for the fading moment, eyelids too heavy.

::

She wakes to a heavy head, cushioned by a soothingly cold pillow. Emily sighs, turning her head so she can feel the much-needed chill on her cheek as she opens her eyes to darkness. 

Darkness and pale skin. Stillness and a strangle. A pin balancing on a knife's edge. 

The Outsider sits on her bed, legs over the edge, his upper body curled around her with a hand twirling her splayed out hair, a familiar book in the other. She is on her sheets, a whale weighing on her chest, feeling decades older than she actually is. 

Her heart beats dully in its cage, muted under the crushing pressure that comes with being twenty-two. 

She is on her sheets, in her room, with the overhead navy curtains of her four-poster bed drawn shut for no light to enter. She doubts there would be anyways, with the lack of shadows drifting beyond the heavy curtains. There is also a lack of people worrying and wearing their feet in her room, no doubt chased out by her chambermaids and maybe Advisor Helmswater if she's still in the city. 

There is simply nothing within and beyond the walls of the curtains, just a stillness in the air and a soothing cold from the presence of the frigid emptiness of The Void. 

Emily turns with what strength she can muster. She closes her tired eyes, drawing her legs and her arms in to curl into the hip of The Leviathan with a groan at the back of her throat. Her arms rest by the length of his thigh, allowing herself to leech more of the quiet cold, savouring it like a chilled drink on a day in Karnaca. 

She doesn't want to know what happened. It takes a long moment for memories to surface and when they do, all she remembers is the sluggish memory of a parliament session with blurry faces and swirling shadows. Her father's face is prevalent in her mind as well, fuzzy but she makes out horrified worry cut into his skin. 

She asks anyway because she is an Empress first and a little woman second. She needs to know what she missed, what went on without her between the afternoon and the nightfall. 

"And what did I do today?" Her croaky voice, so dry, asks the muted entity who she presses her face into. 

"The Empress of The Isles in perilous health? Empress Emily collapses in the middle of Parliament." The Outsider drawls, reporting what should be the headline of today's evening print, his hand stopping it's fidgeting on her hair to turn a page, then back again before she even misses the chill. 

Has the news leaked so quickly? What errant mouths, freely roving around as if there is not an Oil crisis on the horizon. 

"But of course, that was last evening. The journal this morning was even better." He continues. She tries not to groan louder upon the realisation that she has been out for more than a full day. "Empress Emily Kaldwin absent from court for the first time in twelve years, what does this bode for the future of The Isles?" 

Oh, bother. The Royal Protector absent during an assassination attempt on the Empress when she was eighteen and no one bats an eye. The Empress faints in court and everyone loses their minds. Double standards for the man who protects the Empress and the Empress herself. Not even a day and her officials lose their heads over the possibility of Dunwall's downfall. What is she? The lone horse that pulls the carriage that is Gristol? Without her administrations, the world will crumble? 

Emily reaches blindly for her air-cooled duvet, dragging it over to cover her chin, wishing she can do the same for this falter in her strength. 

Horrendous, this parliament of hers. She is not a totalitarian, willful leader. Her will may be iron but her officials have their plays as well. Her failing health only calls for more power for themselves. Weeding every weakness out of her as ribbons for their bow ties. 

All teeth bared, the only outcome for showing weakness. They dare use them against her, even after the power she graced them in court. They have nowhere near the freedom of what the previous privy council had of course, but they have the power to legislate, to write bills and proposals even without her presence. They can come up with all sorts of laws they want. The only thing stopping them from proposing unconventional decrees is _herself_ , as every bill can only be passed by her. And of course, her never-failing presence during court, until now. 

It is efficient for the Parliament, laborious for only her. 

And they exploit this weakness so freely. 

Emily presses deeper into the soft, soothing cold. The bubble in her head is making itself known once again, announcing its presence as a pressure down her neck. The thought of needing to be stronger, to have more steel in her spine, it tightens her chest even more than the weight that is sitting down on her now. 

"Where is my father?" She asks, though knowing she is muffled by the cool fabric of his pants. 

"Retired to his Chambers. He wore a trail on your carpet." The Outsider replies indifferently. She pulls the duvet higher to her eyes. 

"I'd figure." She mutters. 

"Quite a surprise you gave them; falling like a puppet with its strings cut." His hand leaves her to flip a page, then falls back down onto the duvet on her face instead, a cool thumb on the sharp of her cheek. 

"Father was probably horrified."

"Dived for you as you fell. The lack of a bump on your head should be obvious." It is. 

"And you? Were you looking?" The words slip out of her mouth like the promise of friendship did so many years ago. Unplanned, without thought. She carries on like before, as if it was on purpose. Even if she doesn't know why she asked. 

Emily can feel the sudden pin of his scrutinising gaze even under the layers. 

She does not open her eyes to meet it. 

The Leviathan lifts his hand, and without letting her miss the cool comfort of it, he pulls the duvet fully over her head. 

She opens her eyes to muffled darkness then. 

"I wasn't." Of course not. He has better things to look at. There was probably someone else being very interesting on the other side of the world as well, more interesting than a woman fainting on her feet. Even more so that he wouldn't feel a thread of worry. The Outsider has a cold, dead heart, ever always watching the world with impassive eyes, harbouring an emptiness that is the natural result of being part of The Void. 

Though, how did he know her Father had saved her head? 

A flip of a page. His hand rests back on her face. Over the thickness of the duvet, she still feels the soothing chill. 

He had probably already even seen it through the glimpses of The Void, not even fazed by her falter. 

"So why are you here?" She cracks the ten-inch thick layer of ice that they hold their air of lulling comfort in. 

His hand moves from her face. She feels the soft pressure go, and the chill of it leaves. There is a snap of her book. He replaces his hand with something hard and heavy, echoing a residual cold. 

"Time is not linear in The Void, Empress. A few moments, in reality, can be stretched out into millennia, a millennium can be compressed into seconds." A well-placed hum. "What do you think? If you were trapped in The Void, how long would have passed after you escaped?" 

She doesn't move the book and duvet away in time to call after his meaning before he disappears.

She catches the tail end wisps of rampant black smoke and fluttering ashes, a migraine pegging in her mind at her movements and a seizing hold on her heart in her chest. 

Foreboding.

He didn't mean the question to her. He was thinking out loud. Wondering. 

His words are a melody. Beautiful arrangements of sentences to lull the listener into a sense of vulnerability that will allow him to strike right into their core to snare them into a trap of life debt and taking. 

His intonations and musing tones leave his audiences wanting more, wishing for more, left in a rampant hunger to hear and heed his approval even if they don't know it. 

A power to be given here, a promise to remain interesting to him there. 

His thoughts, however, are inquisitive and truthful. It is the raw insight into the workings of himself. His impassive character, an unobstructed view of a world through his all-seeing, onyx eyes. 

Emily is privy to this view. What time she has to herself, she spends most of them in his company. His thoughts, always voiced out in stares and glances and hums. Where his fingers roam, where his gaze points, where he moves to, she observes the gears behind the eyes of an abyss, trailing after the plays of time as he does. 

When he voices out his thoughts through his lips, it is always the truth. Obscured in dark shadows. Crisp and inquisitive. Borderline cryptic.

_"If you were trapped in The Void, how long would have passed after you escaped?"_

Her breathing stops. Emily collapses back on her bed with dread pooling in her mouth. Stillness in her lungs with the apprehensive crushing of a leviathan on her chest. 

Many meanings but pointing to only one. 

Something is coming and she will play a big role in the events that it spurns. 

* * *

"Good sleep?" Billie L _—Meagan_ asks, raising an eyebrow upon her stepping onto the deck. 

Emily pays her no heed for a moment because her attention is taken by the skies smothering the light of Dunwall overhead. Delilah's insurgence has caused the city to fall into such a desolation, punctuated by this dark skyline of rolling thunder and destruction that made smoke from fires that had broken out from buildings look like deep-set storm clouds. 

_"Such a masterpiece."_

Her dying heart aches for the people of her city. How they are coping, how they are being tortured in their very homes after she had promised them safety. Oh, how she had tried so long in ensuring nothing happened to her Empire after her Mother's assassination. _For nought_. 

Emily walks to the other side of The Dreadful Wale away from Meagan, where she faces the southwest side of Dunwall, it is where the Rudshore District that she had spent months rebuilding and the Old Port District she had expanded six years ago are now standing in shambles before her. She searches through the buildings that line the shore of the Wrenhaven River, mourning for her people who had lived in the houses now overtaken by witch vines and her people, who worked in the industrial buildings that are now abandoned. 

She swerves over to the other side, rushing to the bar where Meagan is standing by. She eyes the homes and once illustrious houses of the upper-class district, moving over to the further districts down Wrenhaven, and she feels so guilty for bringing onto the people of her city the problems of her family. They do not deserve this. They have done nothing to warrant this destruction that is brought onto them. They should not be collateral damage. 

Meagan looks at the Dunwall tower, where Emily now turns in horror to. 

"It's not pretty." She confesses. 

"The person you worked with before did this," Emily jeers. It is only when the words come out that she finds it a low blow. But she does not take it back. 

_"It is a beautiful sight, niece. People will know of suffering. They will learn to build themselves from the ground, just like I did."_

Meagan frowns, looking down at the grey river and bracing her forearms on the rail of the ship. Emily brings herself to pay her the attention needed for this long-awaited talk. 

"Yeah. She is a bitch." She resigns. "It wasn't a pretty time." Emily keeps silent, nodding her to explain. "Daud changed after… After… It was the last big job we ever did and...and—I'll just start from the top." She stumbles, trying to pull her thoughts together. 

"Take your time, Meagan." Emily soothes. She leans her back against the ship as well in an effort to ignore the desolation of her city behind, an elbow on the rail, head turned to the older woman as she readies herself for a confession. Emily merely stills her cold heart, having known the biggest secret already. 

She will never forgive the woman, no matter what sob story comes out of her mouth, be it sympathising or heavily ridden guilt. Emily will listen, read underneath the lines of her words, but never forget the crime this woman did against her in the past. Nothing will ever make up for the burdensome sorrow she had carried and pulled and still does, through the long years.

"Meagan. People have called me that for a long time, but you know it's a lie." She starts. Her gaze is far away to another time. "Daud took me into a gang of mercenaries when I was younger, fifteen years ago when I had run out of ropes to keep myself alive. He was the Assassin leader, and he pulled me up from the Dunwall slums and taught me to survive. You know the group, The Whalers."

Emily nods. Mercenaries for hire. Corvo was the one who dealt with them when they were a broken gang with a leader, with untethered members still roaming around what was once a flooded Rudshore District. 

"We were paid to kill people. Some of them were worthless scums born to ruin society, and some of them...weren't." Meagan shrugs. "We only followed the highest bidder, and on our last big job together… We were paid to kill…" She inhales. Regret in her breath. She will never say it. 

"You were paid to kill my mother, and somehow it changed Daud." Emily finishes for her as a matter-of-factly. Her dying heart is making it easy to be more straightforward. 

_"How brunt. You've grown a bone."_

Meagan flinches. She recovers easily enough but stares at Emily like she was wearing Delilah's face itself. She shakes her head away. 

"Yes. I don't know what else to say." She confesses. "I've lived a very long time regretting what we did that day; the suffering we caused to the people of the city. But most of all, allowing Daud to take the brunt of the blame." Her shoulder falls. Emily can feel her own face school into a blank poker. 

"And how did Delilah happen?" 

"I hated how soft Daud had became." She confesses. "How he started doubting his actions. I thought him weak. Working with Delilah is an overstatement. I only gave her information. It was a deal. I kill Daud to become the leader of the Whalers, and she collaborates with the Overseers to apprehend the assassins I didn't want. 

"But I was irresolute. I couldn't bring myself to kill a man who forgives his enemies, a man who took me in at my worst. He let me go. It was the end of any association with either of them. I left Dunwall and I swore to never come back."

_"Weak-willed. She would have never gotten far from the dirt without Daud."_

"But you came back twice." Emily points out. 

"Never thought I would." She says, thinking to a time long past. 

Irony. Life's greatest joke. 

Emily thinks to a time long gone as well. Emily thinks to a time when her life was painted in a sea of black and white, where everything was either good or not. She thinks to a time when adventures were more fun than listening to geography, seven years old and happy. She thinks to a time when life was about running around and pulling faces at that _horrid_ Hiram Burrows whenever he passed her. 

She thinks to a time when life was about talking to an entity in a domain of frigid hungry emptiness and listening to the secrets of the old and young. 

Emily wonders if she would be doomed to walk The Void like the others who were given power since Delilah runs black like sleek oil in her veins now, touched irreversibly by frigid stillness and whale song. She wonders if she would drift by The Outsider and not know who he is. 

She wonders if she would be unable to fulfil the promise of a ten-year-old, much like any other promise made in the belief of a bright future. 

Emily looks at Billie. At Meagan. 

"A time long past, Meagan," Emily says. She turns her body to her. Looking at her, then towards Dunwall Tower and the dark clouds that swirl around it ominously. "I will never forgive you for helping kill my mother, but that guilt you hold for helping plunge Dunwall into a pit of darkness, that is not for you to endure any longer with. I have already brought back Dunwall from the brink of destruction, and the citizens grew stronger in the will to stand together against treachery. Suffering just has a way of twisting people. Whether it will be for the better or for the worst version of ourselves is up to us."

Meagan pulls herself straight, looking straight at her. 

"We've all been hurt, I guess." She starts. "Not all of us did what I did or became what Delilah became. But I will never get over it just like how you never will, your majesty." She affirms, looking away again and on toward Dunwall Tower. 

"I hope not." Emily bids. "I don't hope to see you soon, Meagan. But I do hope you live a lighter life."

Emily turns. She has to ride to her death now. With Delilah twisting in her veins restlessly, it makes her feel harder to breathe. The cold in her chest is frostier than ever. It is starting to burn, now that she realises. 

"Your majesty?" Meagan suddenly calls. 

She turns her head to look over her shoulder. 

"May I give you a final ride?" 

She just doesn't want to lose her Skiff.

With a grin that doesn't reach her eyes, Emily turns fully to regard her with a judging hand on her hip. 

"Only to bring it back to the ship. I've always wanted to commandeer a boat on my own." If only old Samuel could see her now. 

She clicks her father's mask onto her face, waiting for Meagan to pull the anchor of the Skiff. 

* * *

**"**

_He feels the woman beside him. Staring at the ceiling, curled up in the chill of his presence, a lazy finger prodding the exposed skin of his wrist._

_"Do you have a heart, Outsider?"_

_He does, actually. It is in his chest, black with ichor, heavy with nothing. Still and quiet._

_But that is not the answer she seeks. She likes the waxy poetic truth. Lulling words soaked with nothing but unadulterated honesty, laced in the silver of steel sharper than blades._

_"I do. I don't like it." He says. "And you, Empress?"_

_His gaze flickers to her. The cream of the ceiling of her four-poster bed sharpens onto dark eyelashes fluttering against the pink of sharp cheekbones in a blink._

_Emily shuffles closer. The blazing warmth of a body snug against his side like a leech._

_"I do too. It doesn't like me very much."_

**"**

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._**

* * *

_"Take me back to Dunwall Tower, niece. Bring me back to the cage of my own chest. Your life is such a bore to me."_

Emily frowns, looking over the dark seas crashing against the rocks surrounding Dunwall. Delilah thinks that she would be returning to her own body. As if riding Emily was just a means of fun entertainment in the meanwhile. Her egotism does not factor that she will take Emily's spirit along with her if she does what she asked. She manoeuvres the Skiff over to the abandoned shore by an equally abandoned factory, just behind the wall of Dunwall Tower. They bypass whaling ships, some empty and partially capsized, some still afloat and abandoned out on the sea. 

"When you release Delilah from your body, you die?" Meagan asks, looking to her with a sense of finality. She is lounging by the back of the Skiff, straightening from where her head was held up by a palm. "What's the plan?" 

"I kill Delilah's physical body and then myself, thereby ending Delilah's spirit as well," Emily divulges her question brusquely, watching the grimace pull on Meagan’s face in her bluntness. Her tone is dull, almost as a matter-of-factly.

_"How naive you are. I am in two impossible places at once. I inhabit your heart in your still-living body. I walk the halls of your crumbling tower. I sleep in your sheets. Has anyone ever told you that you smell like The Outsider?"_

Emily's lips purse. Her father never questioned. None of the Overseers felt it when he visited in silence, and no one ever saw. As far as she knows, she was the only one in that tower who could taste the cold of The Void as she does. Until he took that away from her and cut all of The Void but Delilah away from her, that is. 

_"You let your mother fade into oblivion. Do you know where my mother is resting? In a child's coffin, with her skinny legs tucked beneath her, all because I couldn't afford a proper burial earlier. While my father sleeps in the imperial crypt."_

Has she desecrated the land where the dead rests as well? Has she torn up her mother's body and laid curses on her bones? Or has she grown vines, herbs, and poisonous flowers, the beginnings of a devastatingly beautiful garden, because she has no need for a cemetery? 

_"How fitting you are, with your father born a nobody."_

If anything, the voice in her heart is spurring her to get the plan done faster. 

Emily pulls to a stop by the mottled sandy shore, tinged in grey, just before a lit bonfire of overwhelming warmth. She nods to Meagan and steps out of the Skiff. Around them, crumbling scaffolds stand. Cranes that pulled Whales into slaughterhouses, they protrude from atop the wall, chains swinging lonely in the wet wind. Up ahead of the path, stone stairs are lead to the street above. 

She has seen what has gone on in her visits to the more prolific slaughterhouses. Anton has had some regrets upon the electronic stimulation dealt to the whales as they were lining up to be slaughtered. Is it so sad that she likes the sight of these houses abandoned? Despite knowing that her city was probably out of every utility ever possible? 

She had discussed some possibilities of perhaps moving away from the Whaling Industry with some of her Physicians and technological engineers back a few years ago, but those plans would hardly come to fruition anytime soon. Though she hopes Jameson and Anton would pull it up again. 

It becomes harder and harder every day to justify the way she had dealt with Kirin Jindosh. The brightest mind of the generation, not really arguably. She could have done him a better deal, but perhaps also not. 

Emily checks her equipment a final time without the necessity, before stepping back. 

"I don't hope to see you anytime soon, Meagan." She bids. An early death is never wished upon anyone. 

The woman nods gravely. “Farewell, Empress. I’m glad to have served.”

Emily watches her manoeuvre away, before turning and making her way to the streets on top where she knows will lead to a long row of industrials and distilleries. The first one atop these steps will be the black market. 

"If it was anything I've learnt from Karnaca, Delilah," She starts, trudging through sand, wondering if the woman will hear, thinking of the treacherous rule of the son that came after the glory of the Father. "It's that birth shouldn't give anyone the right to rule."

She pauses, eyeing the wall of stairs past a slope of rocks. Then breaks into a sprint, hopping up grey rocks and kicking up the wall, jumping over the rails of the steps with a hand to push off. She lands with a grunt. 

"You have to earn it every day, by serving the people who need you."

_"Pretty words for someone without a throne. Shows how you rule. A perfect world will never need such toiling work."_

"A world of false happiness won't make the people of reality feel any different. Your throne will sit in a hall of blood, and you will sleep knowing your followers had to be forced to love you." Emily vows, making her way up the steps, looking across desolate grey streets. Scanning buildings of any form of life, watching stray dogs as they roam freely. 

_"Plucking for words you are, little girl. Do remember that your father stands in my throne room, a statue of cold stone. Will you bear to let these people of Dunwall live in a beautiful lie or force them out into harsh reality? When you die, will you leave them behind in agony or peace?"_

She knows the tone Delilah has in her voice. A cruel Empress she would be, to stop her people from living a life without pain. Especially when she won't see it rise again.

::

It is hard to traverse the ruins of Dunwall. Both physically and mentally. Much less Kaldwin Boulevard right outside her home of twenty-five years. 

Abandoned buildings left and right, a destroyed townhouse with the entire front all but peeled and crumbled onto the streets, forcing the entire interior into the open. Just to spite Delilah, she knocks out the witch looking out of the opened top floor and drops her in the bathtub. She clambers down the open townhouse and jumps onto the rail carriage tracks. 

She had laid waste to the world right here. Her people were slaughtered, killed much like the whales in those Houses. 

_"There are cracks in the world from the Outsider's birth."_

Emily leaps off the tracks and onto the corner of a building, where she hears the sharp mumbles of a man talking to himself about some hidden safe room. 

_"We draw from these fractures. Can you still feel them_?" 

Delilah mocks her, where The Outsider has cut all ties of his existence to her that not even the slightest whale song of a rune nor bonecharm can be heard right in front of her, all reduced to carved whale bones. Emily will never feel the numbing cold of The Void ever again, only blessed with the glacial chill that is Delilah in her blood and the steady knife in her hands.

She jumps to the adjacent balcony, and forces herself flush against the wall by the doorway to hear for additional footsteps. 

There is a faint one moving out of what was once an elegant reading place, becoming softer. Emily peers into the room, and without hesitation, lunges for the man— _Hatter_ —standing by a wall of dark wooden shelves and a boiling heater surrounded in a mess. She chokes him into unconsciousness and drags him out onto the balcony, out of sight of the archway into the room. 

She shuffles back in, moving to the shelf for the whiskey tumblers sitting decoratively.

As the other Hatter comes into the room, she launches a tumbler into his face and grabs him by the neck to suffocate him. 

_"Go on. I can hear the songs that you find mute now. How do you feel about not being able to hear a rune when it is right beside you?"_

The adjacent doorway leads to another dingy room with no exit, ending her path. 

Emily tells herself that shrines contain more than just runes or bonecharms dedicated to heresy. A good one will have health elixirs and hoarded food and coins, in the event that The Outsider visits, they will give him these offerings that are meaningless to him. 

Two walls have furniture stacked against them within the confined space, the far wall has a painting hung above a ruined cabinet and a fireplace in the corner. The adjacent wall on her right is empty, save for a radiator by her leg against the wall, and a wall-mounted barometer on the reddish-brown wood. Strangely out of place. 

She reaches for the barometer, pulling on instincts to turn it and is pleased to find that when she steps back, a panel of the elegantly decorated wall sinks backwards and pulls to the side to reveal the aforementioned safe room. 

A safe room housing a shrine dedicated to The Outsider. Such a secret location only meant for heresy. 

Emily knows that when she touches the whalebone atop the clothed altar, there will be no fracture into The Void. There will be no pull to drag her into a place of frigid emptiness with constant hunger. There will be no Outsider to appear beside her through a burst of black smoke and white ash, prepared to tell her some other secret tales from long ago or to merely look at her with an unreadable gaze. 

She does not even hear the echo of a whalesong. 

_"Don't you just love the sound of absolute stillness?"_

Just a carved bone on a table, marked with prices of wood and scrap wire, adorned with gold coins and dried herbs. 

Emily turns to look around the rest of the small space, with the left wall shrouded with the signature purple tapestry. She eyes the right wall of cabinets full of treasure and burnt out candles sitting atop. 

She used to enjoy blowing them out, once. 

Emily grabs the health elixir, eyes the silver ingots without the need for them, and stuffs a can of the hoarded Pratchett Jellied Eels into her pouch before opening another. 

She slowly makes her way through the entire can of gelatinous eels as she surveys the rest of the room and out, turning back the barometer into place to close the secret room, letting the heresy rest. 

_"Soon, I will dream the dream of a new world and all will change."_

Emily makes her way to the secret exit from the Imperial safe room inside the tower, tracing the path she had leapt out of, so many weeks ago. 

* * *

**_"_ ** ****

_Her tufted hair is black, dark and inky against the white of the bundled sheets. Her eyes are a light yellow, ochre and gleaming against the soft afternoon._ ****

_Emily sees them from here. resplendent irises reflecting the same gold in her father's eyes._ ****

_She leans forward on the bed, a pen in a hand, shuffling the papers around as she watches the scene before her unfold._ ****

_The barely-there sunset casts a shine on his face, lightly tanned and freckled from every chance he took to bathe in the sunlight like a cat before now. He raises a prodding finger, mesmerised by the babe in his arms as the child grapples his hand._ ****

_He looks up, feeling her stare. Ochre catching the light beyond her windows. A spinning mind working behind them._ ****

_And he smiles. Cold inquisitive exuberance melts into calid fervour and his affection spills over her in a glow a thousand times warmer than the sun._ ****

**_"_ ** ****

**_Emily Kaldwin. Excerpts from a time that will never be._ **

* * *

Delilah enters the painting, welcoming an illusion. 

A bright light floods the throne room before—

_—"NO! WHAT HAVE YOU—_

—before the painting peels itself back in reverse, restoring that picture that Delilah had so skillfully painted for months. But instead of an empty throne, there Delilah sits in her glory, her cunning aristocratic face almost gloating, sitting for all the world as if she belonged on that throne. _The world as it should be._

Emily leaps down from her perch. But she doesn't see the ground clearly as she moves. She doesn't land on her two steady feet. Her legs give out and she falls forward onto her hand. 

Figures that her body will start to give out upon Delilah's death. An empty shell, left in the rampage of a destructive host. Is this how she will die in the end? Delilah killing her, instead of the other way around? 

Without the adrenaline from a sweaty confrontation, her body feels like lead. She groans when she tries to pull her muscles to a stand, shakingly slow with a knee bracing on the ground then finally standing with an inhale. 

The world spins. 

Her arms spread out further to balance. She tenses her abdomen to force her blood to pool downwards instead of rushing into her head. 

Perhaps she should move towards the pillars instead. 

Her mind is silent. She relishes the lack of criticising comments, but the coldness in her veins in the absence of Delilah threatens to freeze her blood. And it is this coldness, that she finally realises, is chilling her. Unbearably. Forcing her skin to slowly become peppered with bumps. This cold comes from within. Inescapable even if she pulls on more layers. 

She had never had to fear the cold, much less even be bothered by it, after the hyperborean visit to The Void when she was ten. She once bore the Tyvian snow in nothing but a turtleneck when she was twenty, and now she shivers in the wind caused by her own movements. 

The Outsider must be laughing, if he is watching at all. 

Emily stumbles to the looming column on the side of the throne room, where toppled glass shelves that had once displayed her mother's portrait and various chairs are crashed against, a fine layer of dust on every possible surface. Where people of her parliament stand in a crowd, all frozen in anguished stone in their attempt to flee. 

She sees her father just beyond them, lonely in grey. 

What will he think, when he sees her dead at his feet, soaking in a pool of her own blood? 

But even with that thought, she makes her way there slowly, with her head pulsating and her skin cold. It is a slow, agonizingly slow walk, but she cannot force her legs to move faster than it already is, with her vision threatening to blacken with spots and give out, with her muscles requiring a strong will to contract. 

She reaches her father, panting and so, so sleepy. 

She grasps his frozen outstretched arm for balance, moving in front of him, and oh, his features are captured so well even in stone. She misses him so much that her dying, bleeding, heart aches. 

With her other hand, she fetches for the twin-bladed knife hanging from her pouch. 

It is tiring to even think to raise her arm. Her body feels like there is a ten-pound weight hanging from each of her limbs. 

The cool bronze of the blade rests by her neck. Emily is thankful for the length of the knife, where her hand does not require much to be raised, and the sharpness of the blade, where she need not require much strength to force the knife through her jugular. 

Her father will be horrified. Blood will spill across carpeted floor, almost like it did on marble. Splatter against a stone boot instead of leather ones. 

Her fingers ache as they let go of its hold on frigid stone. With a deftness hard to achieve with a hand of a partially cut tendon now aching in the cold, she releases her father's mask over her face, allowing it to clatter on the floor as her fingers yield insufficient strength to hold the heavy metal. She forces her hand to rise, to rest on her father's face. 

She doesn't know if her vision swims because she is about to faint, or if it is because her tears are blurring her eyes. She likes to think that it is the former. Somewhere deep down, though, knows that it's because her tears are falling freely. 

How could she not? She is about to leave behind a world in wretched ruins. A father in despair. The chaotic end of a chaotic shortlived lineage. 

She was born into the world, surrounded by a wet nurse, the Royal physician, and a chambermaid. Her father was in the room, but he had to stand beyond closed curtains, stiff and vigilant, vibrating in nervous energy in his heart. He only ever heard her cry her first, but was at least the tenth to even see her face. He was known as Royal Protector, not Father, of the newly birthed princess, despite it being the worst secret in the history of The Kaldwin name. 

Perhaps, it is with great irony that he will be the first to see her at her death.

Her heart clenches coldly. 

The Outsider said that he was present too. A flash of his unwelcome presence, to see a tuff of hair of the princess that will come to demand his answers and fall off of his lands twice. 

At her death, however, he will not grace her with his presence no matter how welcoming she feels she already is. 

Irony. _Ha_. Life's greatest form of a joke. 

Emily looks up at her father's eyes. Stone. Unseeing. 

He will grieve forever. 

She can't bear to look at him any longer. The guilt twists in her gut, the knowledge that she will condemn him into a life of loneliness and sorrow. He wouldn't last, without his only weight in the world that is her gone. Because she knows she will feel the same as well if this was the way he goes. 

Emily holds the knife just a little more tighter. 

She closes her eyes, and she listens to how her heart beats so quickly. There is ice in her veins, making her blood move so slowly, making her feel so sluggish. She wonders if her mother has ever felt so cold when she is not being held in her hand. She hopes she didn't. Emily confesses to only herself that she only loved her mother's heart for the sound of her voice. 

She tries to listen for sound, for imminent company. She wonders if her servants and her advisors have gotten to safety. She rues for whoever will have to clean her blood. There is nothing she can hear. Not even a single hum that should be coming even from the corrupted human bone at her throne. Not even a wail of anguish cries from witches upon Delilah sealed into her own art. Everything is muted.

There is no sound in these halls despite the men in grey. Nothing but her shallow breaths and the cold blood in her ears. If her father can still hear even his stoneness, how much has he screamed just to hear himself to prevent his mind from going mad in the silence? Did Delilah take her time to keep him company with her harrowing presence? Anything better than stillness and silence. Emily knows.

On her skin, she feels the edge of the blade resting against her neck. Sharp. Waiting to cut into her flesh. She feels cold from inside out, like even Dunwall's summers will chill her. She knows that with every breath now, her body trembles in the wintry air she breathes in and out her lungs. She wonders if this is worse than the frost of Tyvia, the one that even had her father shivering whilst she enjoyed the outdoors in nothing but her turtleneck and pants because she was so accustomed to the bitterness of The Void. 

When she opens her mouth to savour the air the last time, a chill runs across her ears, down to her legs. She can only taste the ash and dust of the room, underneath the cold drying her mouth. 

Her mind is starting to draw a blank. Her head feels so light. The world feels floaty, a muddled mess blotting around her. 

She opens her eyes, looking at the grey of gelid stone, reminding her of the frigid emptiness of the eternal hunger that is The Void. 

Emily laments so many things at once, and nothing. Because this is what she has always wanted. A reprieve. A release. Never to be confined to overwhelming needs ever again. Never to be needed any more than she could ever give _ever_ again.

Her Empire will go on. Her father may fall. But the world will still spin. The Void will still consume. And The Outsider, will still only be there for things that interest him. She isn't one of them anymore, no matter how long she spent with him. Twenty years is nothing to an immortal god. 

She exhales slowly. Her grip tightens. And in. 

She pushe—

" _Emily_." 

Winter blooms from her neck.

* * *

**_"_ **

_"Daud."_

_The grey man jumps to his feet instantly, going from sleep to sharp awareness, hand brandishing a sword and mark glowing. Old age has not dulled the knife just yet._

_"What in the—Billie let you live?"_

_Ochre eyes regard the Assassin unimpressively. A hum. An impassive face, sharp edges leaning back against the worn table. "She did."_

_Would she have changed her mind, if he hadn't given Daud a piece of The Void? Perhaps not. She would never even have been in the same world. She would have been untainted. Untouched._

_Just like Emily would have been._

_Daud lowers his blade. Shaking his head. Resigned. "That damn empathy of hers. Don't know if it's a good or bad thing at all."_

_In his professional opinion, The Outsider thinks it isn't. Given the cumbersome, abyssal, physical chasm in his chest now._

_Emotions. The loss of her presence was great. The physically deliberating emptiness carved into where his heart should be when he has to live in a world where she no longer does?_

_Billie should have killed him in mercy._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from a long time later. Long time never._ **

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few words:  
> I dragged out Emily's weird emotions because that is how it was like for me. They were the longest times of my life and I couldn't think about anything until the feelings subsided, and everything else seems shorter in comparison. Maybe I shouldn't translate it here, but hey this fic was written in obsession. In my defence, Dishonored is a _good_ obsession.


	6. And he loved her, constantly.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is not omniscient. And he sees that he never will be. Poignantly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had exams, but that's not really why I didn't update.  
> I rewrote this chapter a couple billion times. I'm still having mixed-feelings with this one.  
> But anyway, it's all Outsider action here. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Dishonored.

* * *

**_"_ **

_Stonefall. The heavy crumble of grey and gravel._

_Here the father comes._

_What wonderful family they are, so outstandingly unique._

_The mother who was murdered, forced herself to tether to life so as to be with her lover, her child. The aunt who crawled through dirt and dragged herself to heights never reached before with nothing but her ingenuity. The father who forced his way through life, with honed skills and a heart, never stopping even when he was thrown back to dirt._

_The daughter, who managed to cull The Void, and even forced humanity into a god._

_Thunderous footsteps. Blood plinking on smooth obsidian floors._

_"Outsider?!"_

_He doesn't deign the forgotten his attention, as interesting as Corvo had been during his lighter years. The Empress is infinitely more rapturing than any other._

_Even in death, she is enthralling. Forever warm in his hands. Here, they have come a full circle. Twenty-five when they first met, twenty-five in her last. What pity, that he will never hold her like this again._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *

He looks at her, youth in her eyes and smiles light on her lips. He knows what she could have been. 

Greying skin, a body bled dry. A state that can hold his gaze for all eternity. 

"What are you thinking, Wyman?" She asks, innocence, an intonation bleeding so cheerily in her voice. Her hands are clasped behind her back. She holds a scrutinising gaze, sharp as it should be, seeing everything and saying nothing, every twitch being turned and examined in lightning succession. All it takes is a single capture, a fraction of a second. 

Golden eyes stare into golden eyes, before looking away at the barely-there sunset casting beige over the city of growing metal with automobile horns blaring down the street. 

What _is_ he thinking? 

Red running under skin. He knows how easily they bleed. He can still feel her blood pouring on his hands, staining him cardinal red _red_ **_red_**. 

Crimson, Stark on pale skin. Maroon against the gunmetal grey of her throne. Her blood ran red instead of poisonous ichor as dark as astrament. Vivid, an imprint in his mind for as long as he will live. 

" _Emily_." A voice chiding. Even in death, she will forever be warm in his embrace. 

When he turns, he will always see her dead body in his peripheral, never to leave his sight forever, imprinted in his mind, haunting him at every step. 

Thousands of lives. Almost all of them ended with the same outcome, with varying ways. 

He looks down at her from over his shoulder. Inclining his head to catch her attention again before she falls back into her mind. She likes to dwell in the Palace she built in herself, exploring the many corridors and rooms and libraries. He would too, if he was ever privy to how she thinks. She is intriguing, a splendid tumulting mix of cunning intelligence and deeply rooted curiosity. She is driven to become a compendium of whatever she can get her hands on, eager to nitpick at every single detail until there is nothing left to look over. 

How will she react, if she knew what he was thinking? 

She looks up, a slender black brow raised in expectancy. 

"Your mother." He says, finally. He looks back at the city beneath them, eyeing the crude beginnings of alternative sources of energy to whale oil. Volcano shaped structures coming to life in the slowest motion, in the distance on a separate island. One day, no more whales will be culled for another species to survive. That is the promise of the ongoing rise of such cones that would become a fixture of power and stability amongst the skyline of Dunwall. 

The birth of a new age, spawning from the fall of an Empire. 

At least nothing but water will burn this time. 

"Oh. I'm not surprised in the least. I see how you look at her." She miffs, nose scrunching in the flicker of a moment, turning away as well to look at everywhere but him. 

He finds it amusing. She has a penchant for avoiding sentiment, being able to be easily flummoxed by the reasons behind emotions. Reasons, so often very irrational and absurd. Emotions are perfectly valid, of course. Chemical reactions within the body inciting feelings. It is the study of social relations, the understanding of human interactions and the perplexing applications of antipositivism, that were never her forte despite being someone who is able to spin webs of well-timed truths and coveted subterfuge underneath layers of meandrous honey-sweet words just like her mother. A player who plays interchangeably and adapts accordingly to their surrounding environment in rapid succession. 

Emotions, rather inconvenient to her work ethic. 

She grimaces. He can see how she is torn between her mother's form of relief in between her taxing heavy-duty work and _him_. She has a mischief heart, impervious to order, calling for the world to concede to her impishness, but she is also such a sucker for righteousness and rigid rules. Because what always is _is_ what it is and should _always_ be. 

There is nothing between her mother and himself, and still, there is everything in between. 

Layers of companionship, blood, tears, and sorrow. On his part, that is. She only ever had the mistake of existing. 

Her mother will never be any the wiser even if she knows the extent of what he is. 

So many lives slipping through between his fingers. He has nothing left of her but 'what could be's and' what should have been's. He does not need to close his eyes to hear the sound of blood plinking sharp on polished obsidian. 

He eyes the girl at his shoulder. 

The orange break of the setting sun, now roaring in a blaze in the midst of a burning sunset, casts her in a fire. Red flames licking molten gold, glowing Amber. He knows he will see the same in his own eyes now. 

"Are you bothered by us?" He asks, almost with an inquisitive tone in his voice. Almost like it seemed he cared for her thoughts. 

Her head tilts away from him as if annoyed by his fatuous question. Her eyes narrow on his face. Mouth pulling into a familiar frown. 

"I know who you are, Father. I hear songs in my dreams to disturb my sleep when _she_ needs to rest." She says. "Only you'd know that if you had a heart, my mother would be in its place." 

A tilt hooks on his lips. She scoffs and looks away when he tilts his head at her to let her see his amusement. Her analogy is accurate to a fault. 

And it seems that she has made her stand about them. She knows that there is an intangible form of comfort between her mother and the partially mortal chthonic deity that is he. Her very existence merely alludes the fact that they are very seriously involved, or were. The air of easy companionship between them is unmistakable, speaking of years of some vague level of intimacy. She knows well, that if there was anyone completely, utterly, and unconditionally devoted to her mother and all of her wellbeing, it would be this infallible, fallen god who had been with her since she was barely able to recognise compasses. 

And by all means, she is correct. 

Because if it was anything he found himself to be consistently doing for the past decades, it would be spending every single moment of her life with her, for her. It took twenty years for her to cut deep into his chest to forcefully and manually pump a heart that had been still for nearly four thousand years. Twenty years for an untouchable, imposing embodiment of The Void to become a fallen acolyte of swirling shadows and inky darkness. 

He had been nothing but cycling and pouring and running through her life. From feeling her wispy soft tufts of ebony hair to watching her bleed out purely red against cool obsidian, to holding her forever warm body with unfocused eyes staring at him. 

To holding their child in his arms, sunrise glaring sharply at his face. 

His obsession with her spawned long before she was ten and demanding. He knew who she was going to be, how she was going to become it, and why she was doing _anything_ so before she had even knocked into him on marble steps solid and stark white in her dreams. 

He _hated_ it. Hated loving. Hated being _human_. Because emotions ran so wild and out of his control until ichor stopped running black in his veins and the bursts of the illustrious chemical reactions had been sudden and invasive. 

The birth of _feeling_ , like a stake, poised sharp and steady, slowly making its way and sinking into his chest. 

It happened long before she bled on cold obsidian. 

It happened just before he started to show that he cared, far before the beginnings of her own affections. 

And it just about bloomed when she was young and youthful with poison running rampant in her veins, her first brush of death too close. No one but herself wanted to lose her. And that desperation tasted like ash on his tongue. 

So many lives, slipping through between his fingers. 

Lamentations, too. A mere mortal humanised a four-thousand-year-old god in twenty years. Oh how _far_ he had fallen. How much he had given. How much none of her lives will ever know because they ended far too early in blood and death before she could ever find out. Humanisation, the feelings and emotions, it weighs heavy on his chest. 

And here, where he is. Red running under his skin, forever trapped here, and so fortunate to be in a future where she lives and will live, able to show her the extent of his love as he is now more than just twisting shadows and black crystalline ashes fleeting around in the dark. 

But blood ran red on his hands. He cared for her most, at her most vulnerable, and her most uncompromising moment where she all but laid down her life for a future she would never see because she felt unworthy of living in it. Living in one where he drove her to feel unworthy of his attention. _Regrets_ , they bleed him dry just the same as she had. 

He looks down at the girl beside him, no longer having a sly smile on his face. No longer amused because humour was what he fell back against to express himself. 

This _girl_ , black-haired and ochre eyed, pale skin and looking every bit of her mother and none of him but those defining features, carrying herself like a homogenous mixture of different metals. Different characteristics, but ultimately the same material. Her existence is the very evidence of what all of her lives could have led up to, because, for all the sorrow and grief that was twisting and turning her inside out with no will to carry on, he would have forever been by her side, never letting her be alone for just a sliver of a second, because that was how he expressed.

 _Care_ , nothing like overlooking her every second to ensure nothing happened to her. 

_Care_ , devoting his entire humanity to her and nothing else, because she gives more than she should for the entire world, pushing paper when she was all but prepared to sail to Pandyssia, sparing every moment not snatched by her emotions on an Empire that will never know the extent of what their Empress will do for them. 

Because she will always be an Empress first, and a woman second, hefting her people to a future none has gone to before. Marching them towards the end of a monarchy, blazing past revolts and usurps to her name because her people deserve better. 

He looks down at the girl beside him, and he sees the 'what could have been' of every single life of the Empress. 

"And how do you know me?" He asks drolly, expectant, but hardly. 

She turns to him, an eyebrow pinching, a frown tugging on one end of her lips. 

"The Abbey had strictures against you, Outsider. I would be a fool to not know the unnatural chill you and my mother carry around." She says as a matter-of-factly, almost annoyed. Then, "though to what extent, I'm afraid I don't know. How true was The Abbey of their words against you?" 

Exquisite annoyance bleeds into curiosity, a very familiar tone. An almost insolent prod. He sees where this is going; pansophical curiosity giving birth to entitled questions. 

"I see. Peculiar question. Though, of course, only you would ask enlightening questions." He muses. He watches her, as her frown purses. 

"Would you answer them?" 

He raises an eyebrow, turning slightly to face her as she did to him. Why would anyone wish to know the truth of The Outsider, much more than asking him to grant their frivolous wishes upon receiving his attention? 

"Would I?" He condescended. "What makes you think you are worthy of the answers to your inquisitive questions?" 

She huffs, glaring at him none too gently. Vivid summer eyes sharp in his own. 

Born in the Month of Harvest, indeed. If he looks down, he would still be able to look into the sun in her eyes, molten gold swirling in an all too intelligent gaze. 

But he looks up, into steady fire blazing amber in the horizon. 

"I may not be an heir to a throne any longer, but that hardly means I'm any less worthy than my mother when she demanded answers from a god." She avows, raising her chin. 

Is that so? 

He grasps her gaze and leans down ever so slightly. 

"I am utterly devoted and impartial to your mother." He divulged, then a tilt of his head to hit his words home. "Despite who you are, _Daughter_ , you will never come close to the regard I hold for her." 

And he pulls back. Dismissal, clear between them.

He turns away, knowing how her face is schooling into an impassive expression that mutes the irritating emotions rolling underneath her skin. 

Because what better annoyance than the annoyance spurn from being denied the assuagement of curiosity?

He lets her mind run. To roll over and tumble in his refutation. 

And then, 

" _Even at that age?_ " A mocking abject horror. 

He rolls his eyes. 

"Time is not linear and never will be. Your mother met me when she was five, I met her when she was _twenty_ -five. Cease your mockery— _stop_ that." 

She dissolves in a fit of laughter in the midst of his words, unable to hold back blooming giggles, falling back to humour to pull veils over touched feelings. 

Raucous, light laughter fills the air in his silence, and he huffs in amusement at his daughter, watching mirth shake her shoulders and warming the tension around them. She will wriggle out those weightless answers to her hefty questions from her mother, and she knows it so. They will spend hours talking about wispy shadows and intangible secrets, indulging in timeless saturated gossips, and he will watch in their shadows, and he will continue to do so until The Void runs out in his veins in the nearing future.

They are like this. 

She will never hold it true that she was birthed with Void-tainted blood running under her skin because he had forever in the palm of his hands and he never made the inferior world do anything but dance for his entertainment. 

To let her think that he will never regard her as anything more than the result of copulation done to cope with grief in light of the impending need to take back an Empire. It allows for less wondering curiosity in light of spite for a mere seed donor. 

He watches her gather herself, straightening the steel in her back and pulling back her gaiety into hidden seams. 

While she is his daughter, she will never be anything like him, and it shines through in the way she carries herself. She will be like her mother, through and through. 

A neutral face regards him coolly. He looks at her, expectant.

"You weren't much older than me when you became a god." She remarks suddenly. Because just before her, he never aged and after, her mother had noted this once when they had come across one of his hidden portraits stashed in a richly adorned hidden altar. It wasn't that he liked to appear this way. He just is. 

A fragment of time, captured years before she was born, painted by an unblooded great grandfather who only had verbal and written accounts of his appearance to paint into life. 

Any older this daughter of his was, she would have been likened to him like a younger sister. Though now with more humanity than the Void crawling in his veins, he is rather relieved it will never be the case. She sees this the same. 

"And you weren't any older than your mother when your grandmother was assassinated behind there." He nods to the gazebo behind them dismissively before looking back over Dunwall, blood-soaked in the intensely growing sunset. 

This shade of red lines them both, and he doesn't need to look at his hands to know that the untouchable light will be too opalescent to be the vivid crimson dripping off his fingers in more than just his dreams. 

He doesn't need to turn to her to see her narrowing her eyes at him again. 

"For a god, you are utterly smitten by my mother, and no one hopes to know why." 

Smitten wouldn't be the word he would use. And for anyone, really, he doesn't know why they aren't raptured in the very enthralling enigma that is The Empress of Change just the same. Pity, that. But more time she has for him it is, and no one shall speak of The Ex-Head of the League of Imperial Protectors ever again. 

"I would prefer 'devoted', rather than 'smitten'. Your mother hardly needs me fawning over her." 

She scoffed. "Don't think I don't see the shadows dancing whenever Mother is bored during Parliament." 

"Entertainment should never be deprived. Especially when dealing with pompous fools who think too highly of themselves." He concedes. "You like bantering with them, for some reason she will never be able to understand." 

"Mother ends arguments too efficiently. She doesn't see the joy in coercing more inane details from their heads and using them against them." She sniffs, finally turning her head towards Dunwall. "That is entertainment to me." 

Well-spoken. He does the same in court, during what session he deigns important enough to appear in instead of mulling around hidden corners in boredom or placating Pandyssian wildlife and making use of the Void still in his veins while he still can. 

He hums. 

"Your Mother would rather traverse the Pandyssian lands than be stuck in the same room of objective parliamentarians that might be planning her demise behind her back." He says. "If she dragged out debates as you do, she believes that she would likely never see the light of day." 

She would never raise her blade against them either. More likely to do it to herself than anything else. 

Blood pooling cold on obsidian floor, bright red rather than the stark black she expected. He left her behind, a world to reap the seeds planted by her death. A world empty, without her presence filling The Void. 

Here, she lives. Youthful and far older than any other. Middle age is kind on her stressful soul, with The Void chilling her and holding her image slower in place just like it does to him now. One day, they will both grow finely silver unless her insecurities of inadequacy take her away first. Not that he wouldn't have tried to stave them away, of course. But being one of those reasons for her deeply rooted instability, he will ever only be able to do so much. 

The sun sets. 

Red ebbing into stormy blue and greyish dusk. 

Emily will send Billie Lurk to look for them both soon. For a Royal Protector, she is sent on errands very often instead of constantly tailing after her charge from within the shadows and walls. 

But of course, four people in this world will argue that The Empress is able to fend for herself, given that her competency had only increased with age. 

She still fights as if she is dancing. Streamlined manoeuvres with no wasted movements. Elegance, sewn along with her bones and muscles. More fluid than any of the other three Void acolytes orbiting around her. 

What a funny group they make. Three heretics protecting an Empress with more physical blood on her hands than any other monarch, The Void's chosen as a consort, and _their_ mortal daughter. 

Had they not been dissolved twelve years ago, The Abbey of The Everyman would _screech_ in the knowledge, much less remember to crank and play their devout music boxes.

He looks down at his daughter, at her inky black hair wrapped in braids around her bun and ochre eyes glowing against the grey of the skies, and he wonders how she would look with abyssal opal gems, empty with the void and the absence of glittering stars. 

Beautiful, perhaps. An enthralling beauty in the eyes of the mother. An accursed monster in mortals’.

But of course, like her mother, she would enjoy the freedom and the power accompanied by The Void running in her veins.

* * *

**_"_ **

_She is ethereal like this. Forever frozen in time with the twisting tendrils of The Void swirling around her like shadows and smoke._

_"Outsider." He greets. He does not bow. He is not an idle worshipper who knows nothing of The Void. He is not a courier of darkness. He is not marked. He just is. A travelling entity under the veil of a mortal body, given blood again by an unlikely Assassin. In time, he will bleed only red again._

_And she, with the magnificence she exudes now, is a god, with blackened ichor running in her veins in place of maroon cruor and The Void curling around her like the gentle lover he could have been. Would have been, had her life not run out as it did under an accursed blade. Had he given her the comfort that she need not be worthy for him to love her._

_Her hands are laced behind her back, her eyes shimmer in their atramental, endless depths. She smiles. A gentle tilt._

_S_ _he took his place. There will always be an emissary of The Void._

_"Outsider." She greets. "How is mortal life?"_

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from a long time later. A long time never._ **

* * *

She is drinking a cuppa beside him. Steepling fingers circling the mouth of a dainty cup. Steeping tea releasing wispy white mist into the cooled room of dull lighting casting the patrons behind them yellow.

Brown eyes reflecting the skyline on the other side of the window. The muted sun highlighting her sharp cheekbones and the itchy orange of the cafe light casting a softer glow on her back. 

He watches her take sip after sip of her aromatic Earl Grey as her eyes dart around the monotonous sights before them. 

The world is different here. 

A hidden universe away from his eyes, never having the need to meet anyone who didn't need to in the part of existence. 

The world runs differently, here. 

Sleek automobiles of cantankerous horns and burnt smoke. Buildings far taller than any Dunwall mansion, all laid across neat rows down designated streets, lining the skies and making him wonder that if he stood on the top of that triangular glass tower at the end of the street, would the clouds pass through the spaces of fingers when he reached up to touch them? Would the air dampen his hair due to the high saturation of such clouds?

The glass and the height of this building mute the chaos of a population far denser than what Gristol could ever reach in the same amount of time given. They are both different places entirely, different worlds, different _universes_. Here, it is not Gristol even if the continent has the same shape. Here, it is _Europe_ , split into more territories than the number of toes and fingers he has in comparison to the single capital of Dunwall vast across the lands. 

Here, Pandyssia is known and claimed as another continent of life. Here, the wilderness that is Pandyssia is conquered and lived upon, in comparison to the thick miasma of fear and denial with regards to the land back when the world was merely known as _Gristol, Serkonos, Tyvia_ and _Morley_. Not a hundred and ninety-five countries with names merely plucked out from different combinations of the alphabet. 

The air is purer but no less polluted at the same time. The grass is greener but far less common in comparison. More steel metal and glass and bricks and sleek lines with sleek lights than the drab of Dunwall. 

Here, there are more colours. Brightness, despite the spiralling buildings of alpine height, with the sun harsher on sensitive skin and infinitely more powerful without a lingering possibility of darkness. The sun feels like the most powerful thing here. And through the glass, he would have felt the heat if not for the advanced technology that is a continuous supply of cold air through vents in the ceilings of this cafe. 

There are no shrines here. He does not feel any pull to The Void aside from one, and even then, it is fainter than he is used to. 

Emily Kaldwin sits by him. 

She is staring out the window, taking sips from a cup of tea that she is holding with leather-gloved hands. The jacket she wears is hardly the same as the coat from her Empress regalia, with the fabric far softer than the stiffness practically sewn into the sleeves. There are lapels, but the cut is different from the drama that her navy coat was. 

He can see the outline of a gun, under the open jacket. Perhaps the _reason_ for the open jacket. If he were to not be studying her as he is, he would never have seen it in a passing glance. 

Though he doubts she will ever be a passing glance. There are men here, behind them, sitting and mingling amongst themselves at their tables, with eyes that dart ever so often to her. They are accompanied and in the company, but oh, they are raptured by her mundane beauty just the same. 

His own has never left her but only for the view beyond them. He is, after all, not from this world. The skyline is as interesting to him as much as it is chaotic. 

Her eyes suddenly slide to him. 

A languid blink, drawn out to the longest of seconds, regarding him none so gently with the scrutinising force that could be likened to a detective. He can see the cogs turning in her machinist mind, taking in his flummoxing appearance; his aberrant-looking natural ochre eyes and the prickly chill of what Void still running majority in his veins. 

And then gone again, where she looks back to the view ahead of them without so much as an exhale in between. 

Dismissed. 

Not uninteresting, no. More unbothered, really. She couldn't care less of the eccentricities of others in this colourful world she was born into. Perhaps, with regards to his eyes, she has dismissed him to be just another exotic combination of nature's finest. 

And in a sense, she would be right. 

He looks down at his rings, then back up again at her side profile, watching her daintily take another sip of Earl Grey, staring out into the enormous world beyond them. 

Emily Kaldwin. Here. Different and the same. 

Alive, when just a year or two before in a different universe where she was Empress, her blood tasted like metal on his lips, and his hands were nothing but soaked in the rufous of her cruor. She is blissfully unaware of the outer workings of magic and chaos, in comparison to the many other worlds where she was only alive because of the anchor she made him to be. 

He scoffs inwardly and shakes his head. 

He finally turns away, and he feels the inquisitiveness of her intense gaze upon him again as he walks through the cafe crowd, blending into humanity in the absence of The Void. 

::

He sees her again. The same Emily Kaldwin who was a mundane beauty sitting on the high chair of a table facing the skyline view of a densely populated city. 

The remnants of the chill of The Void in his veins, pulling him to universes where he had once never mattered to the world. 

Possibilities, and what could have beens. Outcomes of what she could be. Should be. 

And here, here he sees her in all her glory. 

Blood soaked. Red dripping off her fingers, staining the white of her dress shirt, darkening the black of her suit jacket. 

She is panting. Standing in the midst of the office, surrounded by the carnage of broken furniture and equally broken men sprawled across the marble floors. On her left, the darkness of the night spills over her outline through floor to ceiling windows, with the dim light of the desk lamp pouring an opalescent glow on the vivid red on her face. 

Her head snaps up from the woman she had just sliced the jugular of when he exhales upon the entrancing sight of her in her element, eyes sharp and promising death in his carelessness. 

He smiles, and laces his hands behind his back, regarding her with a careful gaze and a tilt of his head. 

"Hello." He greets. 

Her hackles rise. He can see how she is considering the enigma of a peculiar man she had seen in the cafe here in the office of blood and gore with her, unblinking of the chaos. 

He sees her face pull back, muting her emotions under an artfully crafted mask of cool calculation. 

"And who may you be?" 

Her voice is a tad different from what he is used to. This universe, so different in so many ways. She speaks with an accent that she had grown up in the environment of, not the one he knows her for. 

"My identity is irrelevant to you, Emily Kaldwin, first of her name." 

He sees the narrowing of her eyes at his vague words, at her title, if it is any more relevant here than he is. 

He walks closer. Purposefully sliding over with languid strides, moving down the steps to the lower platform of the office where the sofas are arranged in ceremony with the desk just before the windows and also unceremoniously littered haphazardly with men in various positions of death. 

He swipes the awfully familiar copper of a clockwork mask nonchalantly off the marble floor on his way and stops a mere dead body away from her.

Even in this world, Piero Joplin is as eccentric as ever. Dreaming dreams that he shouldn't be. How pleasing (perhaps not really, but he can't be bothered, truly) to know that he still exists here, in close contact. 

He offers her mask back with an outstretched hand. A tilted head to gesture her to take it. 

Brown eyes bore into his own. With much apprehension, she takes the mask off his hands and hooks it on her belt where the mess of the mechanism faces her thigh. 

"Mercenary, Kaldwin? Who cleans up after your messes hm?" He says, sidestepping the body at their feet and her pool of blood. Moving closer into her boundaries. Emily's jaw clenches, no doubt being too hyper-aware of his intrusion into the six feet radius of her space. 

She does not step away, and he sees how annoyance swims in her eyes upon the silent challenge of her defiance. 

"Whoever is hired." She says curtly, and then, "what is your business with me?" 

He glances away, skimming an eye over the disarranged desk, and reaches over for the handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of the man lying atop the mahogany. He is pleased to find the silk unmarred given the stab wound in his sternum. 

"Little significance, Kaldwin." He dismisses, holding out the handkerchief, awaiting her movements. "Though I do mean to return you to your world of ignorance after I am done with you." 

She snatches the silk from his fingers, and he sees a twitch on her lip where her annoyance shines through. 

"Depends on what right you think you have with me." Deft fingers wipe still running blood off her face with as much efficiency as a silky handkerchief can muster. She doesn't step back from him to give herself space. She doesn't show that she is intimidated. Emily merely raises her chin in confidence to challenge him like she always does. 

How lovely to not be categorised as a threat to her. How lovely, to be treated just the same as every other version of her.

"Fair enough." He takes the step back that they both need to breathe easier and pulls on a beloved muscle to disappear from her sight. 

He appears by the small bar on the far left of the office, peering at the labels of the various bottles of alcohol with his hands still clasped behind his back and paying no heed to what existential crisis Emily Kaldwin is having by the desk upon seeing his use of Void powers. 

There are no apparent labels he can recognise, with each bottle of alcohol standing in different shapes and cut. But he sees the names of Whiskey and Brandy and he plucks a square crystal bottle and—

And he tilts his head to avoid the knife thrown at him. 

The blade sinks onto the picture hanging above the table with a dull thud as if it was a mere dart to the dartboard.

Without the inhibitions of Empirical duty, it seems Emily Kaldwin would be far more dangerous when provoked in comparison to her other variants in other universes. Though, of course, it is a given. She is almost always born into a hazardous world, trained in weaponry arts, growing up to be skilled in one way or another, with varying levels of ignorance at the same time. 

This Emily Kaldwin is no different, even with disparaging birth environments. 

A smile grows on his lips. 

"What the hell was that?!" Her voice is demanding, more of askance than loud intimidation. 

He turns to give her a side glance of acknowledgement, watching her snarling face and taking note of another knife in between her dexterous fingers, and dismisses her by turning back around to retrieve the tumbler glasses for a light drink. 

He pops the clasp of his chosen bottle, releasing the heavy spice of hard liquor a tad sweeter than he is used to. 

"That was power, Emily Kaldwin. Or what is left of it." He drawls, pouring a sliver of the sunset amber liquid into the two glasses he had set out. He plucks a cube of ice from the bucket in the corner of his eye for one of the glasses and two for the other. 

He turns around to meet Emily and her frowning face, with her mind spinning behind her eyes. Her stance is still ready, to spring or to avoid. He holds his glass of Whiskey and a cube of ice in hand, leaving hers behind him. 

She looks like a reverent warrior, prepared to meet hostilities with a challenging arm and a sharp eye. Her stance is ready and still relaxed, waiting to respond to a single change in her surroundings. 

He can see how her body is built for speed and accuracy like always. Her lanky build and pointed edges, feet light on the ground to dance away at a moment's notice. 

"Otherworldly and impossible." She contests, lips pressing together. He waits. Because her mind is spinning, and he knows that she is smarter than whatever ignorance plaguing the stubborn Mortals unaware of his existence. Her eyes dart all over him, scrutinising every odd detail that she is trying to pin on him. 

She will find none of those, of course. Shadows will never twirl around his body ever again, and neither will black ashes and riveting inky smoke. She will only ever find his features atypical. He knows his eyes stand out here amongst a sea of honey brown and blue foam. 

Her hand tightens around the grip of her throwing knife, when she meets his eyes. Her demeanour changes then, with a straightening back and a face wrought with stifling cold anger.

"What are you?" She asks with an inquisitive tone, her hardened stare glinting and holding his gaze steady, burning with sternness and a fire that makes her undeniable, she leaves her question open-ended, and his head twitches when she continues. "Other than a doppelganger, taking the form of a dead man." Her teeth clench the words at the end, enunciating them with a fervent passion. 

Doppelganger? 

"Have you seen this face before, then?" He cocks a curious head to the side, because how peculiar. He had never met anyone who looked like him in any universe. Never had the means to hear what words of a man with hair as dark as astrament and eyes like the pitch black of the night other than from the words of a woman who died painting his skin with her blood and from those who sang his songs. 

Emily tilts her chin up as if testing him with her sharp gaze, testing his curiosity. Forged in unknowing or in mockery. 

"My husband, _Doppelganger_. You appear to me this way and you ask for a way with me?" She indulges him. 

His doppelganger. 

A man with his likeness walking around the world like any other mortal, falling in love with an extraordinary woman, perhaps not even knowing the cunningly devilish and dangerous second life she leads, or possibly knowing and is even a part of it? 

An ordinary man, a coincidence. 

A doppelganger with his face, or a boy who didn't spill metal red cruor onto stone? 

A universe where his variant did not become a god to ascend mortality and ignorance? Where Void shadows do not spill through his fingers like tainting black ink and ashes do not curl around him like a second skin, with his body not literally falling apart into black matter in the eyes of mortal men? 

He brings his tumbler to his lips, smelling the heavy vanilla sweetness lying underneath the bitter of alcohol and spice malt. 

A little too much for the moment of revelation, because it seems that The Void has a mind of its own, evidently now. 

He tilts the tumbler away from him and pours the contents out onto the marble floor. Liquid pittering on the cold hard ground. 

Was that the reason for never coming across this interesting universe? Why he never had any obligations to appear here, compared to the rest of the universes where he was known and recognised as a benevolent god, living and existing in a realm of man, known to watch worlds dance in his favour, with special characters making most of his time? 

Because he existed here, in some form or another? Because he had everything he wanted, lived a life he could ever want, and has no need to meet the god he could have become. 

Some of the liquid amber splatters against the leather of his boots, and he pays no heed nor cares for it as he stares at Emily and her oblivity to the workings of a reality above her own scope. 

"And was his name Wyman?" He asks indifferently, nearly sounding impassive, almost nonchalant. He sets the now empty tumbler on the bar, breaking her eyes for a moment, and leans back to rest his elbow on the heavy wood of the table before glancing back up again. 

"If you know him, why do you still appear like him?" She answers, affirming his quiet realisations. 

What game well played, with a god now revealed to actually be a pawn in his own chess game. 

The Void is all. 

His _doppelganger_. His _variant_. 

A life he could have lived. _Normal_ , without the knowledge of what he knows as a god. 

How amusing. 

He bypasses her question entirely and pulls up his own, because it isn't about her now, though nothing will ever _not_ be about her mostly. She is the centre of the universe that he spins around in, after all. 

Everything is always Emily Kaldwin and her absurd lack of self-preservation and morbidness. He sees too much of himself in her and he will never let go of her because of it. He can't help it. He watched her grow to nearly become him, and he couldn't do anything otherwise to stop her. 

But for now, this is about him. Him and how he died and how he was able to love a woman to the point of commitment and how he was able to put her in the centre of his meagre existence and still _breathe_ . How he can _die_ before her. 

It's either too much or too little, and he swings back and forth like a pendulum between either. 

"And how did he die? Was it recent?" 

He watches her grit her teeth, such a show of emotion, before her entire body exhales along with her breath and pulls back visibly into stillness. 

She becomes mute, watching him again with a self-contained face after he dug a hook into an evidently precious and sore subject. 

She spins her knife and tucks it back into her sleeve, perhaps under a wrist guard hidden safely from prying eyes. A still presence with a relaxed body prepared to move at a moment's need. 

He reads her, he reads her. 

And he sees how much she has fallen to the Emily Kaldwin he truly knows, with darkness and grief blanketing around her like a second skin, with melancholy in every silent step she takes and every breath feeling like a waste on her existence. 

He sees this, under this veil of blanketed calmness and impertibility almost mirroring his own. 

They watch one another in slow blinks as she contemplates telling a man who has the same face as her dead husband of what killed him. He waits. 

A corner of her lips pulls into a short frown in a minute twitch before her face rights itself again. 

"An aneurysm. It went undetected and burst in a class." She takes a step backwards and smoothly leans against the desk with a dead man laying on top, mirroring him. "Three years ago and no one at fault to kill." 

What a coincidence. 

Billie made the choice to let him live three years ago. A monumental error on her part. 

Though, class? 

"He wasn't a mercenary?" It is hard to think of who he would become otherwise. He doesn't think he can be anything milder than someone who will constantly have blood on his hands. 

She shakes her head, looking away to a small rectangular paraphernalia set askew on the desk. The strange appurtenance has two rectangular bars holding up a row of small metal balls of similar sizes in the centre, each hung with a string attached to either bar on each side. Emily pulls on the furthest metal ball, lifting it away from the centre and releases it. 

The ball swings, hitting the following one with a light tic, though it is the ball of the other end that moves away with the rest in no motion. When the ball falls back to hit the following one, the ball on the other end raises, and it continues this motion with each hit of the balls ticking in the silence of the room. 

"He was a physicist and a philosopher, but is far better in debating philosophy than teaching physics." She says. "He doesn't care for the morality of the world, only for truth and how to exploit the fundamental nature of existence."

Ah. That does sound more like him. He won't ever have the moral obligation to care for what anyone thought. It is not a side effect of having been a god, but it is how he grew up to the middle of his second decade. How he had grown as a freshly-made god to simply become. 

How he must be rolling in his grave, knowing that he died out of his control. He knows he would. 

"Well, I am sorry for your loss. My utter condolences." He tilts his head to her, his tone betraying what sentimental meaning there would have been in his words. 

Emily doesn't care for what he shows. 

She blinks, unimpressed. Almost waiting for his next line of jabbing words digging caverns in what heart she has left. 

"What pity that I will never meet him," He says, straightening back against the bar table. "Though, for the better, I suppose."

"Ha!" She bursts, a sharp bark that pierces the air, pulling at the short strings of his attention. "I'm sure he would have taken to meeting you who carries his face so righteously, above having to leave a materialistic world behind where he could use everything to his advantage." 

She says the words so acrimoniously, with a face all but snarling with her eyes. 

What did he leave behind, then? 

Emily Kaldwin is all but a demure woman who would ever need a lover to defend what she stands for. This line of work she is in testifies to that. His leaving would do the same as a mother leaving her behind at her most needed time. 

A slow and torturous death by the means of grief. Efficiency, unwavering. Her life will always be her work first and her wishes second. For a lover to leave her, she would only be fazed in her darkest moments alone, as he knows. 

Why so bitter? 

He looks over to her glass of Whiskey, prepared and left sitting with ice already diluting the powerful char and vanilla of the malt. Golden wisps blending into colourlessness, a discord in tranquillity as the copper liquid melts into the transparency of the other. 

He looks back at her, taking in her similar state of dissociation with her stare on him. 

Emily Kaldwin was not seen in the public's eye for nearly a year after she took back her rightful place on the throne. He was otherwise preoccupied with another recently dead Empress and it didn't even occur to him that an inter-dimensional god would be able to impregnate anyone, much less even have the seed to. 

But if he hadn't watched his obsession care for a small mortal spawn from birth to five years old now, then he likely would not even be able to grasp what fleeting emotion is passing behind the woman's eyes before him. 

Motherhood. Such an aching burden. Emily Kaldwin before her death would have been an Empress who has a child to her name with no throne to be abdicated to. 

He leans back, looking back towards her glass of untouched whiskey, and reaches over with a finger to tilt the tumbler glass. 

"How is your child, then?" He asks nonchalantly because it can be nothing else than a man of his virtues would be pained to leave behind—The tumbler glass falls with a heavy clink. Bronze spills with ice sliding to the marble ground—Other than the life he made in conjunction with a woman he loved as naturally as breathing, everything else is materialistic, of course. 

The tumbler glass rolls away from his fingers. Sweetly spiced whiskey spattering to the floor, liquid running into crevices of the bar table and down along the solid wood to join the already warmed forerunning glass he poured at his feet before. 

He glances back up to Emily staring far more intently on his face than before. A chill colder than ice setting his nerves alight with crawls down his skin. 

Right as he is, then. 

He pulls a smile to perhaps mitigate the impassiveness of his words, but he also knows he doesn't care for the directness of them. 

Emily narrows her eyes at him in response instead of launching another knife from her sleeve. 

"Haven't you asked enough already, Doppelganger?" 

Ah. The drawn parallels. How amusing. 

Life was not living until the existence of the product of life creation, evidence that above all else, if he is not to be tied to The Void for all of eternity, then he would find solace in a material world that would require him to watch over just two individuals compared to the expanse of Reality. 

He continues as if not deterred. 

"I take it that she is well, for all things considered. The death of a parent." He nods to her wryly. "Though I wouldn't claim to know what your daughter would be feeling without meeting her before." 

"Son." She corrects. Drawing back her aggression, and eyeing his face for what betrays his thoughts of the mistake of assumption. 

Son. 

Not so parallel, after all. 

Would he be the heir to a mercenary empire, still? 

He blinks slowly in response. 

Perhaps. This offspring would have the choice to grow up in ignorance, after all. To follow in his late father's footsteps, or to find such joy in being paid to slay Mortals plaguing the world just like his mother. 

Knowing the daughter that he knows, he can see what this son will turn out to become. 

A smile. "Son." He reiterates in confirmation. Almost as if testing the knowledge on his tongue. 

A silence, a moment of a beat. 

Then, the shrill of a vibration reverberating off Emily's person. Purposeful and heavy, punctuating the air not in sound, but in motion. 

Emily reaches into her jacket to fish out a slim, black rectangular tablet-shaped packet with no amount of annoyance betrayed in her eyes as she takes her attention off him. 

It is only when she taps on the black packet, that he realises that it is a solid rectangular piece of a communication device. Svelte and sophisticated, as she raises it to her ear. 

"I am in the middle of a job, Mother." Her eyes sharpen onto him, waiting for a reaction from him to this information of her family. 

Another non-parallel to what other variants of Emily Kaldwin there is to the rest of Reality. A live mother. Though the same cannot be the said of her father, he supposes. There is no indication of whether she understood the loss of a parent like the rest of herself, her son in this world and perhaps even himself. 

Does his variant have parents still alive and breathing well, though only plagued in grief from the loss of a child? Or was he still a street orphan, merely built himself to be better? 

He watches Emily speak to a parent known to be dead. An absent mother buried six feet underground a decade after the birth of her daughter. 

This universe is different, though yet still the same. 

Emily Kaldwin is still dangerous, still a world-weary and an almost nihilistic woman working through life as a form of necessity than an adventure. Exploration, still deeply set in her heart with regards to her insatiable curiosity and willingness to go what ends to try and satisfy the unknown, like now where she readily stays behind in a room full of bodies dead because of her. 

He is dead. Dead with no concerns, leaving behind a woman he would have loved as easily like breathing, obsessed over as he himself does. A laughable death in contrast to how he would have preferred to have left. On his own terms. He is still a cynical man wading through purposelessness in a materialistic world, still at awed as to how sleep comes so easily to himself, still awed as to how he helped create life. 

Emily Kaldwin has an eye on him as she speaks to another. 

He looks down at the tumbler, stationary on the dark surface of the bar table. 

With a finger, he swipes it off. 

A pull of a muscle and he leaves the world behind, an Emily Kaldwin living in a world mystifying different from what universes he is used to, before he even hears the glass shatter on the cold marble floor. 

Sunlight blinds his vision for the moment, and he finds himself facing the glaring sunrise at the window of Emily Kaldwin's study. 

When he turns to her as she sits by her desk, he finds her older. Her hair is lighter than he remembers before leaving, and she has eyes like the liquid gold swimming in his own. 

"Where is your mother?" His daughter is sitting at her place, writing a letter with illegible cursive. She doesn't even look up when she replies, the Insolence. 

"The courtyard, beside her mother. I won't fault you for not remembering, given how many daughters you have in reality." 

He stares at the girl, older than Emily Kaldwin was when her own mother died, carrying the same ease of nonchalance that he does with regards to a dead Empress. 

"How poignant." He drawls, feeling a distinctive frown on his face. 

* * *

**_"_ **

_The Empress of the Isles, standing right in his realms._

_How peculiar, this turn of events that have plagued the century. Nothing short of Aristocratic drama, of course, but so much blood and treachery spilt from since the beginning of her line that he had wondered if the world was finally coming apart._

_Usurps after Usurps. It does speak what kind of rule of the current line stands for._

_He was expecting Corvo, knowing his righteous and vengeful heart like the one he forged with purpose._

_Though it is perhaps a refresher, that someone has finally caught The Void's attention enough to pull her in without him noticing._

_She doesn't flinch when he appears before her in smoke and ashes. She stares at him, unimpressed._

_Have they met before? Time is truly not linear in The Void as anyone would think._

_"Outsider," She greets._

_Oh._

_Yes. While they have met, she gives an impassive stare, soaking his presence with a mere glance, not because she is used to what antiques he would display for the time to come for whatever particular reason, but because she has dulled and spun in turmoil for so long, she finds nothing capable of fazing her more than her own nightmares._

_How wondrous, this Empress._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._**

* * *

Calloused skin on mahogany wood. The pink of health flush under the soothing glow of the desk lamp. 

Emily Kaldwin sleeps peculiarly in comparison to whatever other mortals he ever had the annoyance of looming over until they wake, much to the point that she looks deceivingly at peace in whatever pleasant dream. He knows for a fact that she is not.

She is only ever at peace when she is awake and aware and in control. _Sleep,_ is never peaceful. Her mind runs rampant, unstoppable and unwilling to stop when she has no sense of control over her thoughts. In her sleep, she is trapped, and she hates it so.

Emily Kaldwin sleeps peculiarly because she _hates_ sleeping. She will work for hours on end until her body drops over her desk and he will have to carry her to her bed and release the tight bun of her hair in exasperation so she will get the much-needed repair for a body that is constantly running ragged. 

She will sleep on the edge of the bed so her body will be able to jump to safety and defence before her comprehension catches up with her mind and she will sleep for short periods of time because if her paranoia doesn't wake her up in two hours then her nightmares will since he doesn't have the ability to pull her into The Void anymore. 

It is certainly a problem, one that had perhaps come into fruition just before he started to bleed red. Her health will take the worst brunt of her habit if not short term than the long term, though even so, given the situation of the politics she governs over, her wellbeing is the last of her worries. 

It is a miracle; that after six years of political shifts and revamps and addressing of continental and global issues, Emily Kaldwin has not missed Parliament once other than the day their daughter was born. 

But of course, he will not hold on to that miracle. Mortal lives are fleeting, after all. Even the simplest of germs will fall the most infallible if struck properly. 

Not to mention, he is becoming one. Vulnerability, red blood flush under his skin, germs and bacteria and viruses and all that. 

So be it. 

For now, he looks down at her sleeping form, knowing that she is dead to the world for all he cares because she had just spent two days awake reviewing the renewal of the medicinal import contract with Serkonos, parliament meeting minutes and watching over her free-running daughter who is solemnly up to nothing good but also nothing recognisable and everything still legal. 

She looks peaceful, with her facial muscles softened and relaxed, and her hair unbound nor restricted, but is hardly ever. 

He wouldn't join her in the land of dreams ever again, but he will stay by her side to soothe her abrupt wakings from it. Perhaps he could even fall asleep before she wakes the first time, and be blissfully unaware of any of her mental distress pushing her to wake. But of course, wishful thinking. He had slept enough through the years to finally ebb off the mystifying allure of how he doesn't _die_ when he closes his eyes. 

He slides his rings onto the bedside table. Heavy metal clinging onto wood with both physical and metaphorical weight. Rings that he is forever tied to because he died with the sense of attachment of a particularly significant steal over it. They will never stray far from him, and if he could choose, he would rather them to actually be sewn to his skin. 

But it is uncomfortable for a hand adorned with rings to hold anyone. 

And so he sets them down onto the bedside table by her sleeping hand. With a bare finger, he slides velvet across her cheek and tucks her stray hairs away from her eyes so they will not annoy her. Her face crinkles at his touch, with furrowed eyebrows pulling together, and when he pulls away, she relaxes again. 

How funny, she sleeps. Deep into her subconscious, trapped by the needs of her body. It is only ever during these times will he be able to be ever so close. 

He shrugs out of his heavy tailcoat as he walks to the other side of the bed, draping it over the ottoman at the foot of it as he goes. He pulls his belt from the loops into a coil and lumps it on the adjacent bedside table. He toes off his shoes as he unbuttons the top two buttons of his dress shirt so the collar won't chafe his sensitive skin, before finally sliding onto the bed. 

Over the duvet, of course, because Emily Kaldwin now hates the stifling of the covers and is still sensitive to warm temperatures. 

He doesn't touch her. They do not need to hold each other tight in one other's arms to feel the soothing warmth of congenial companionship and comfort like Daud and Corvo do back when he was still able to pull strings of The Void to interrupt them. In comparison, her nightmares are muted and continuous in light of his inability to pull himself into her dreams, leaving her frozen and unmoving, trapping in her own mind instead of reacting outwardly until her heart beats fast enough to wake her. 

He merely waits for her to roll onto her back because even in her subconscious, she is tied to him and will always be aware and not of him at the same time. 

She does, shifting on the sheets, and her head tilts into his direction for him to have the full view of her sleeping face again when she settles. 

Her hand is still on her abdomen, and the other is still close to the bedside table. 

Now he reaches out. Warm fingers finding the crook of a clothed elbow. He doesn't hold her tightly. He just rests the contact gently, feeling the lull of her pulse through her dress shirt. 

They won't move again in their sleep now that he is settled. He is satisfied with their position, with this proximity to her. 

He breaks his resting gaze on her face to glance over at the desk light, turning it off with a flex of a worn muscle in the back of his mind. Darkness floods the room and he fights the instinct to tighten his grip on her again. 

He finds her in the night, adjusting to the absence of light. 

He doesn't close his eyes. He merely quiets his mind and soothes his beating heart. 

Sleep will take him away soon because he stayed up with her through the two days of nothing but amusement and wonder on his part. 

For now, he merely rests his gaze on her. 

Blood threatens to consume him. The roar of worry and anxiety over his loss seizing his half-empty heart and holding him in place.

He stays still. Even as the treacherous panic of losing everything he holds dear now is trying to burn him alive while he is being skewered with a stake through his chest. He lets it wash over him, this unreasonable and unfathomable mania that activates his fight or flight instincts to careen the subject of his adoration to relative safety.

There is no safety, of course. Nowhere will be safe enough to preserve the precious and fragile life of a woman who is all but a danger to herself as much as the world is to her. He can only do so much and help so little, as much of an acolyte of cold shadows he is supposed to be. 

And so he waits. Cold fire setting him alight as his mind drowns him in a pool of metallic and carnage red, vivid like her cruor on his lips and skin. 

He sleeps like this. Anticipation, a choir in his blood. 

* * *

**_"_ **

_She is in his arms, shallow breaths against bloodless skin. She has no strength in her legs to stand any longer, far too much blood on the carpet rather than in her body._

_Her eyes are unfocused, delirium riding her body in place of herself._

_This is not the only ending, nor is it the first, but it is hers._

_He holds her hand tightly; red coating his hand, painting his rings sleek in her liquid life. Delilah had bled out of her since long ago, leaving her bright and untainted._

_He holds her close; a cheek on her mussed hair, an arm around her neck. Her breath, feather-light across his jaw._

_"Wyman?" Her voice is soft, barely louder than her breathing. He closes his eyes._

_"Yes, Emily?" He feels her reaching for him, fingers wet with metal, brushing against his lips. Blood, heavy on his skin._

_"Are you there?" Her voice hardly makes the last word._

_He feels her heart, beating like his own. Nothing._

_"Yes."_

_He exhales. She doesn't._

**_"_ **

**_The Outsider. Excerpts from another life of an Empress._ **

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was fun indulging in this obsession.
> 
> Thanks yall for the kudos and the comments and the bookmarks. It means a lot to me, though I don't reply to them individually.  
> This isn't the first fic I had written, but its the first one I dared to post. I'm glad you guys liked it too. 
> 
> Onwards. Have fun in life, guys.


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